The Cold Reality of Relevance

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When we’re writing copy, we’re always trying to create our content from the point of view of the prospect.

We’re trying to think like the prospect thinks.  Doing everything we can to connect.

This creative strategy dovetails nicely with targeted media strategies.

But there’s a hitch.

A lot of prospects really don’t care.

They don’t care if the ads they’re served are targeted or not.

Research from Zogby Analytics for the Digital Advertising Alliance reveals that 27.6% of us are happy to see a combination of targeted and non-targeted ads.

16.1% of us actually prefer non-targeted ads.

Which leaves just 40.5% of the respondents indicating a preference for targeted content.

So…

If a copywriter is going to think like a prospect…

We’ve got to remember that a lot of us think an ad is an ad.

And we’ve got to remember that relevance often means more to the people creating marketing content than to the people consuming it.

Marketing Content 101: Seven Ways To Edit Your Copy

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If you edit your marketing content seven different times…

If you fix these seven different and specific problems…

Your copy will improve dramatically.

1.  Make Verbs Rule.

One by one, strip out weak verbs and replace them with strong ones.

2.  Get Rid Of Adjectives and Adverbs.

Most of these usually aren’t necessary.  They can easily turn into fluff when skimpy research hasn’t uncovered important facts.

3.  Fix Dropped and Duplicated Words and Typos.

Spell check alone doesn’t do the job.  Reading the copy out loud does.

4.  Do a Clarity Gut Check.

Any sentence you need to read twice to understand is broken.  And if the main purpose of what you’ve written is not clear, fix things so it is.

5.  Inject True Enthusiasm

The fake and phony is easily sensed.  Make sure that a consistent, genuine tide of positive energy flows through the marketing content.

6.  Roll With Rhythm

It’s not about being cute or slick.  It’s about being easily digested, understood, and remembered.  Rhythm makes this happen.

7.  Delete The Preamble

Check the first few sentences to make sure they’re where the message really needs to start.  Quite often, they’re warm-up words that don’t do much.

Read The Sales Letter That Delivered a 100% Response Rate

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It was written and mailed in 1925 by Bruce Barton.

Read it here:

http://www.southportharbor.com/BruceBartonSalesLetter.pdf

The Invisible Structure of Marketing Content

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Most of the time, we don’t even see it.

Effective marketing content is created with a structure that frames persuasion.  And this structure is largely invisible to the prospect.


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We all know that whatever it is we’re creating, we need to start off strong.  This is why a copywriter who understands the true job of a headline makes sure the head sends the prospect barreling into the next sentence.

Headlines that work play by this rule.

We also all know that we’re supposed to finish strong.

A brilliant PS in a salesletter.  An irresistible closing line for a blog post.  Even the perfect, almost desperately anticipated tune, saved for an encore at a concert.

It’s all about the rules of content structure.

And these rules are easy to break.

Writing in a Harvard Business Review blog, organizational psychologist and leadership team consultant Roger Schwarz sheds light on the “Sandwich Approach” managers use to give people feedback.

This is the approach where the conversation starts off with something good the employee is doing, the criticism in the middle, and another positive piece of information to wrap it up.

It makes sense.  It seems respectful and positive.  But Schwarz says the sandwich approach doesn’t work.

He suggests that the bad stuff should be addressed up front.  He advocates more transparent communication with the goal of mutual learning:

Giving negative feedback transparently means respecting your direct reports, not controlling or alienating them; makes both your negative and positive feedback feel more genuine to your direct reports; and lowers your discomfort and their anxiety.

The copywriter working on marketing content can often follow a similar structure.  Intrigue, curiosity, and foreshadowing can peacefully coexist with transparency.  Interest can be channeled and amplified.

Marketing content can be created to do what Roger Schwarz suggests that managers do with their direct reports.

Exchanging unilateral control for engagement.

Looking for ways to inject candor.

And structuring things so that the marketing message isn’t simply told, but discussed.

This doesn’t mean a marketer stops screaming commands at a prospect.  It means that transparency and engagement are woven into the message.  It means that the prospect is respected. And it helps to create marketing content that actually creates a customer.

The Pump and Dump Lift Piece

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Browsing through my swipe file this morning I was attracted to a lift piece from a stock promoter.  Printer on yellow paper it was small, short, simple and packed with power.

The goal of the piece was simple.  A 100% focus on creating credibility for the stock it was promoting.  It achieved this brilliantly by gift wrapping the unknown stock with well known names.

It’s just like the political rally where a well known senator shows up to appear onstage with the unknown rookie candidate.  You watch the known and the unknown standing side by side and the very presence of the senator gives the greenhorn candidate a bit of credibility.  Or, at least that’s the idea.

The lift piece I was reverse engineering this morning had just four paragraphs.  The final one was a strident call to action.  But to construct a credible environment for this unknown penny stock to live in, all sorts of solid people and institutions were mentioned, ranging from Warren Buffet to the American Medical Association.

Unfortunately, the stock ultimately crashed and burned.  Classic pump and dump. But the copywriter’s lift piece, worth more than the biotech firm, lives on.

A Brilliant Way To Schedule Email Marketing Campaigns

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Email marketers who know what they’re doing know the value of being consistent.

They stick to a regular schedule.

J-Peterman-Catalogue

It’s always baffling when a marketer tells me they would never dream of sending out an email every day because don’t want to upset their list.

Well, if you’ve got lousy content, that’s probably true.

But along with lousy email content there’s something else that will upset your list.

Erratic behavior.

We prize consistency.  And as for consistent behavior, no matter how ill-tempered it might be, we can usually deal with it.  Up to a point.

So somebody signs up for your emails, they get in your sequence, a welcome email shows up, then an email a week later, then one a few weeks after that, and then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, an email every day.

This is the fast track to unsubscribe hell.

This doesn’t mean you stick to an “every three days” schedule, or 100% consistency.

Bending the rules a bit is fine, which is what J. Peterman does when it has a good reason to bend them.

J. Peterman will usually mail every other day.  When there’s a sale, they shift to daily delivery. And there’s a wonderful congruency in the subject lines when a sale campaign is underway.  For a three-day event…

(Day 1)  Up To 41% off – 3 Day TINTYPE Sale – Time for some Spring Cleaning

(Day 2)  Day 2 – Phonograph Sale – More Items Added Up to 51% off

(Day 3) Final Day – Up to 51% off + Even More Items Added

Then, the sequence goes dark for four days.

This is a wonderful example of thoughtful scheduling with a consistency that doesn’t fatigue, and doesn’t squander opportunities.

But we wouldn’t expect anything less from J. Peterman, would we?

Building the Perfect Marketing Content Plan

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Marketers who build editorial calendars for their content have a challenge.

Staying relevant.

Planning is obviously a smart move. But too much planning can get you out over your skis. It can lure you into a bit of a trap where your strategy is driven more by what you think you should say than by what your prospect or client actually wants to know.

No matter how good your information is, if it’s not relevant to the prospect, it is stripped of its potential impact.

This is why the great content marketers don’t simply create a calendar that slots content into dates, and makes arrangements for content to be repackaged and repurposed.

The great content marketers do what the great salespeople do.

They stop and ask questions.

A survey in an email sequence does this job quite well. So does a strong preferences page when an email relationship is first launched.

These two tactics help extract the full value of your content by making sure it reaches the right person at the right time.

Let’s say your strategy is something like this…

“We want to establish a position of leadership and expertise by sharing educational content.”

That’s a solid strategy.

To execute, you need to create systems that turn this into a two-sided conversation.

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An editorial calendar where blog posts, emails, and other content are tied to a traditional calendar will not be as relevant as one which pulls in the interests of the prospects.Creating new list segments and new email sequences are two moves which can make the execution of any editorial calendar more robust.

The devil, of course, is in the details. The details of creating enough content to make sure there is a chunk that’s relevant.

The details of setting up ongoing survey tools, and also the discipline to put a meaningful preferences page in place.

This is how the ultimate marketing content editorial calendar is created.

It is how the best intentions of creating useful, educational marketing content come to life.

And it is how a marketer strengthens the relationship with a prospect, customer, or client.

The Risky Business of a Celebrity Endorsement

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My client told me, “We’re thinking about doing a celebrity endorsement campaign.  What do you think?”

I explained that because most celebrities are wealthy, and that because the prospect we're targeting is caught up in terrible financial turmoil, it would be tough for the poor prospect to relate to the rich endorser.

Chances are the endorser has never experienced the problem my client helps the prospect solve.  There could be no plausible connection.

And then I suggested that celebrity is fragile.  That today’s hero could become tomorrow’s outcast or laughingstock, and that this could unleash all sorts of problems for the brand.  Easily avoidable problems.Joe-Paterno-Merrill-Lynch

Tiger Woods comes to mind.

This 1988 ad from my swipe file pours more ironic salt on the sad wounds of this risky business.

Webinar Writing and Noisy Selling

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One afternoon last week, a client told me he heard that you shouldn’t sell on a webinar.  He’d been advised that his webinar should simply educate, and that the conversion of prospects should somehow take place later.

He wondered if we had “too much selling” in my copy.

I explained that webinars are indeed driven by information, which was why the webinar script I wrote was chocked full of facts.  And why these facts were staged as benefits.

We revisited the webinar objectives we mapped out together before the writing actually began.  One of these objectives:

To give HR managers sufficient information in the webinar that they have the necessary incentive to take action and schedule a meeting.

Revisiting this objective helped my client understand that informing and selling do not live in separate worlds.  Facts, explanations, and information are the essential grist of salesmanship.  Platitudes don’t cut it.

But my client’s concern revealed a deeper issue at play.

The notion that selling is bad, and somehow detrimental to the process of moving a prospect through the marketing funnel.

Without quite coming out and saying it, my client was concerned that some of what he called “salesy” sections of the webinar writing would upset and alienate viewers.

His concerns were well-founded.  Bad marketing carelessly bosses the prospect around.  Sloppy webinar writing, and all weak copywriting, falls back on noisy calls to action which are unsupported by reasons why this action should take place.

When the prospect is bullied and barraged instead of being cajoled, she stops.   She freezes and she leaves.   To help the prospect move forward, we need her to feel fascination, intrigue, and a belief that the solution being presented deserves immediate investigation.

Claude Hopkins addressed this notion in his 1923 book, Scientific Advertising:

People can be coaxed but not driven.  Whatever they do they do to please themselves.  Many fewer mistakes would be made in advertising if these facts were not forgotten.

Claude Hopkins was a brilliant copywriter, so his choice of the word “coax” is noteworthy.

Perhaps I simply should have told my client that when salesmanship coaxes, it’s fine.  When it screams without substance, it’s useless.

In any event, the client made some minor revisions to my script.  And all the webinar writing he first considered “salesy” has been kept.

The Very Real 76% Clickthrough Rate

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Clickthrough rates of 76% are typically the stuff of dreams, at least for most pay per click marketers.

But move away from the realm of paid search and into the realm of relevant content, and clickthrough rates like these become very real.

Those links at the bottom of articles that steer the reader to related content… 76% of readers click on these to get more information.

That’s according to a new study by conducted by Harris Interactive for nRelate.

Behavior Shift: Getting Content in Front of Consumers confirms what many of us have suspected.  When we’re marketing online, related article links that give the prospect more information are the workhorses of selling.

Online copywriters and marketers who think related article links are little more than window dressing are missing out on an easy way to engage a prospect, strengthen the prospect’s interest, and advance the sales process.

The key, of course, is to be relevant.

A good tactic for achieving this is to simply carve a large piece of content into smaller thematic chunks.  And then, write an irresistible description for the text link for each chunk.

Achieving this clickthrough is not an uphill battle for online marketers, because the Harris research reveals that consumers love to get information this way.  It’s second only to search for the method of discovering information.

This tactic far outperforms everything else, including recommendations from friends on social media platforms.

The marketer who creates superior online content wins.

And the copywriter who embraces this tactic in the sales process harvests the proverbial low hanging fruit.

Grab a copy of Behavior Shift: Getting Content in Front of Consumers to learn more.

Check out more about what we're all up to online in The Connected Consumer 2012:  Evolving Behavior Patterns, a fascinating piece of research from Oracle.