 Priceless photo by Grok. There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again.
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. To webinar or not to webinar This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. Those are huge assumptions. A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. Phew. If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. Building unbearable suspense Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: Clickbait! Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it. Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.
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 Great photo by Grok. Steve Jobs famously said “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”
What did he mean by that? Is that a hard-and-fast rule that you should never break? If not, when should you break it? And most importantly, how can you generate more revenue from the answers to these questions? Let’s dive in! Creative inference That (in)famous Steve Jobs quote was about his notion of eschewing focus groups when it came to product development. His thinking was, that if you’d asked a customer, say in 1983, what they “wanted,” in terms of electronic brainpower, they would have simply said “a better calculator.” They couldn’t envision a Macintosh, because they didn’t know what was technically possible, nor how to transform that technology into a wholly new product category which would surprise and delight them at every turn. Gee. Steve Jobs was onto something. Who’da thunk? Is this a hard-and-fast rule? Hate to be squishy, but it depends. If you really want to nail product or service development, you can certainly borrow a page from Steve Jobs. The whole idea of creatively inferring what customers want, based on their day-in-the-life situation, is a specialized practice that doesn’t come naturally to many business owners; as such, there are consultancies (and we’ve worked with them) which specialize in this. Let’s talk about marketing. And let’s assume, for now, that you’ve got a product or service to sell which already checks the surprise-and-delight boxes for your customers. If those customers are repeat customers, you have an opportunity here. Yep: you can ask them things. Oh, the sacrilege! Survey the situation We recently helped a client craft a customer-satisfaction survey campaign. We say “campaign,” because it included a few components. Pay attention, and you’ll get ideas for your own business: Our client had always conducted customer-satisfaction surveys at the conclusion of any engagement with any of their clients. It was, and is, a sound business practice: It helps them to continually improve. But, assuming that they’re doing most things very well, it also makes for a very nice marketing opportunity. Think about that: Let’s say you’re a client of this company. They just served you very nicely. You’re about to move on, and lose that precious top-of-mind awareness of what they do… when you get a friendly email from them, asking you to please complete their customer-satisfaction survey. Aha. You’re instantly reminded of them! When you complete the survey, you’re instantly reminded of just what they did, and how good they were at it. What a wonderful reinforcement! …But what if you don’t complete the survey? Then what? Well, you still got the email, inviting you to participate. And there was another dollop of incentive therein; as we’d said, this was a “campaign.” Sweetening the deal The customer-satisfaction survey email was a classic opportunity for our client—and for you, reading this—to easily capture low-hanging re-sell and/or up-sell opportunities. That’s because the email included a referral offer. It went something like this: “Complete the survey, and we’ll send you a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Bonus: After you’ve completed the survey, you can earn a $500 Amazon Gift Card by referring a new client to us. And to make you feel better about referring us, you can tell your friends that we’ll give them a $1,000 discount off of our services because you sent them our way! Everyone wins!” You got that right. Everyone wins. So. The survey is somewhat anti-Jobsian, in that it asks customers how they feel about something that they already bought. But in that regard, Apple is no different: We’ve actually received surveys from them, asking us about products we’ve purchased from them… which have actually included radio-box options for products and features that Apple has not released yet (32-inch iMac, anyone?) So much for their ultra-secretive/customer-detached company culture. You can also use this technique for other, very basic stuff: What topics would your clients like to see addressed in your upcoming blogs, webinars, or YouTube videos? Ask them. And if you toss in, say, a referral program along with the ask, we surely won’t hold it against you. Have a marketing challenge you could use help with? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. Intrigued?
“ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes?” Has Copel Communications completely lost its few remaining brain cells? Not yet. Stay with us on this. And learn how—no kidding—this observation can help your business make more money. Here’s a dirty little secret. While we specialize in marketing here at Copel Comms, we’re really “closet salespeople.” Think of the playwright who shudders at the prospect of getting on stage… but is completely comfortable writing a powerful speech for the play’s leading man to deliver. That’s us. Okay. Shoes? ChatGPT? Is there a thread anywhere in this story forthcoming? Sure there is. As we’d said, stay with us. ChatGPT, and all of the generative large-language-model AI platforms of its ilk, have really changed the way that people sell. The way that you can sell. And, upstream of that, the way you market. Shortly after it appeared on the scene, ChatGPT basically torpedoed email-based marketing and outreach—and thus the sales that those were supposed to generate. The reason is simple: It used to be that only reasonably intelligent English speakers could create grammatically correct outreach notes. ChatGPT eliminated that requirement. Since its advent, every mouth-breather who can click a “Generate” button has been able to churn out grammatically flawless… spam. Yep. Spam. The ISPs quickly clamped down on this. The spam filters got tighter. Even now, Google (in a related story) is tweaking its algorithms to filter out AI-generated content. But ChatGPT is old news. The platform debuted during the pandemic, for goodness’ sakes. The “old news” aspect of this story is good news for our clients and businesses like yours. We’re seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of email outreach again. Isn’t that nice? And, just like in the old days, quality matters. Remember the ol’ “three-legged stool” of email marketing? It consisted of the quality of:
Guess what? That’s true again. Which gets to shoes. Specifically, “shoe leather.” We’re talking about the old days, when salespeople would “pound the pavement,” going from business to business, to the point where they would wear holes in the leather soles of their shoes. Hence “shoe leather.” ChatGPT does not wear shoes. It doesn’t understand how you can (and perhaps should) “pound the pavement” to actually generate sales. Example: We recently penned an email (is that a mixed metaphor? We actually used a keyboard) for a client of ours, directed toward their current clients, introducing a referral program for their services. Per best practice, the offer was “two-sided”: “Refer a client to us, and they’ll get a massive discount on our services. And you’ll get an Amazon gift card. Everyone wins!” So. It was a matter of taking this good offer (Leg 2), turning it into a compelling message (Leg 3), and sending it out to our client’s list of existing customers (Leg 1). Another dirty little secret: The client’s list of clients was small enough that no automation was needed. So “Dear [First Name]” was typed in as “Dear Linda,” and so on. Sure, it was old-fashioned manual labor. But it was effective. Proving that pounding the pavement, in its modern iteration, can still yield sales. And proving that ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes. Need help with a marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Matheus Bertelli. Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely:
We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. You might be surprised at the trick to all this. Ready? Aim low. What??? What???? You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. Aim low. Allow us to explain. The attainable cadence The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month? Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. Now take your answer, and cut it in half. Really? Really. The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want. For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. The calendar trick Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. Think of it. You now have two cushions: 1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in.  Great photo by Antoni Shkraba. Boy do the months ever sail past. Time, already, for our annual round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2024. Here’s your chance to catch any you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
As we start working on next year’s articles, we’d like to take this time to thank you for tuning in to our 2024 entries. We love sharing the love, and your comments make our day. Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran "Ghost Email Writer.” Kind of an odd role to put on your resume, no?
It’s on ours. More importantly for you, however, is the answer to this question: Which business emails that you need to send are so important that they would warrant having a pro step in to pen them? That’s what we’ll explore in this article. Touchy subjects There is a common thread when it comes to emails that we ghost-write for our clients. It’s generally what we’d call “the big ask,” which kind of goes hand-in-hand with “the humble brag.” Both of these are hard to do. They put you, as the writer, in an uncomfortable situation. Err in one direction, you look like a jerk. Err in the other, you appear too meek. And in both of those situations, you don’t end up getting what you’d wanted. Talk about a fine line. First things first: You don’t really need to hire a professional writer, like us, to write an email like this. You can really work your tail off, and polish it, run it by colleagues, and even push it through ChatGPT if you want it to sound generically-correct enough. The question is: Is that worth your time? If you’re reading this article, chances are, it’s not. (Spoiler alert: We charge a mere pittance for things like these, for our clients, especially considering the upside ROI they deliver.) But so far we’ve been dealing with generalities. Let’s dive in and give you two real-life examples. Ghost-Written Email Example 1: To a former client We recently helped a client create a series of marketing videos for their B2B consultancy. On their website, they’d had an ancient, but great, testimonial from an old client of theirs. They hadn’t spoken to this client in ages. Can you guess where this is going? Of course. A written testimonial, on a website, doesn’t do you much good when you’re creating marketing videos. Talk about a big ask: We wanted this former client to record themselves, on camera, giving a testimonial about this company that they’d worked with, a long time ago. Yikes. And so our client asked us to ghost-write the big-ask email for them. Confession: It wasn’t easy. But the finished product went something like this: It opened with a “Hello, old friend, we hope you’re doing well,” followed by “we’re so glad that our company has helped your company succeed.” We also thanked them for letting us use their written testimonial on our website. And that was the segue to the videos we were making. We’d already had the first one produced by the time we ghost-penned this email, so we included a link to it, so that the former client could watch it and see how good it was. Then we got down to the big ask: Could they simply read that same testimonial on camera, and send it to us? We even included its text in the email, like a script. We noted that, “By our estimation, this should take about, well, 15 seconds! So hopefully it’s not a huge ask.” And we closed by saying, “Just as we have helped your company, you’d be doing us a huge solid by helping ours.” The email worked. The old client was flattered by the request, and promptly obliged by recording and sharing a quick video. Bonus: Our client’s firm suddenly became top-of-mind for this former great client. Talk about a nice dollop of biz-dev! Ghost-Written Email Example 2: To “the secret handshake club” Whereas the previous example was written to be sent to one specific, known person, this next one was intended to be sent, one-to-one, to a select number of very exclusive recipients who were all total strangers to the sender. We need to be very cagey here, as this one is super sensitive. That said, it’s one of the best emails we’ve ever written, and it’s ended up netting our client millions. This client of ours had carved out a profitable B2B niche doing technical “cleanup work” for large enterprises. But they longed to broaden the business, and their client base, to include the specialists who helped those enterprises create the situations that inevitably required cleanup afterward. Those specialists were the targets of the email. We can refer to them here as “the secret handshake club,” because that’s how close-knit, clubby, and insular they are. Our pitch, which we ghost-wrote for the owner of our consultancy client, went something like this; note how it combines the Big Ask with the Humble Brag: “Hello Mr. or Ms. Secret Handshake Club Member. I would like to help you as you advise big enterprises as they embark on big initiatives. Full disclosure: I’ve never done this before. But I have helped numerous enterprises with the ‘clean-up’ that’s come from all the overlooked issues in these initiatives, which I’m uniquely qualified to spot, given my experience. Would you have time for a quick call this week?” Guess what the response was? It was awful. That’s right. It’s a secret handshake club! Most of the sends ended up with no response whatsoever. The few that did respond, had some choice suggestions for our client, which we can’t reprint here. But then one—just one— Secret Handshake Club member wrote back. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll bite. Contact my assistant to book a call with me next week.” And that was all it took. That call led to a test project. That test project turned a toe-in-the-water tester into a new client. That client effectively provided entry into the Secret Handshake Club. Fast-forward to today, and that consultancy client of ours now splits their billing, 50/50, between their classic “cleanup” projects and Secret Handshake Club assignments. And it all started with one inexpensive, yet really well-crafted, ghost-written email. Have a challenge that warrants a ghost-written email? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.”
Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam postal mail was superseded by spam email. Ah, progress! Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for your business, and your outreach. Dialing up the numbers game First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on that topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.) Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly. Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company. The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday. The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article. A matter of cost Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago. And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed. You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever. And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet. No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out. Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working. Where have all the emails gone? One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.) Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was--gasp—a cover letter. Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital. It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more. Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog. Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now. Need help with thorny issues like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Alena Darmel. Here at Copel Communications, we get tasked with lots of different writing assignments. There are video scripts. Blogs. Case studies. Email campaigns. Sales decks. Landing pages. Social posts. You name it.
Thing is, a lot of these overlap. And therein lies an opportunity—for you—to approach your marketing outreach more effectively and cost-efficiently. Learn from our experience and evolved best practice. It’s actually pretty simple, but it requires both foresight and discipline. Signed, sealed deliverables Our clients will typically want to promote something (a product, a service, an announcement) to as many people/prospects as possible. Which requires leveraging various media, such as web pages, YouTube, email, and so on. And here’s where the “package” concept originated. We realized, early on, that all of these deliverables-centered-around-the-same-story were basically all parts of the same, bigger thing. Thus we coined the phrase “content package”; you might not see it described that way elsewhere. The idea of “packaging” these, however, is powerful. First of all, it’s hugely efficient. If you’re going to create one of these things, create all of them… at the same time. Note that we said “create.” Not, say, “post” or “publish.” That might be staggered, depending on your media plan. But you do want to create them all at once. It’s going to be easier and more efficient for your writing resource, since they’ll need to align their proverbial ducks just once. That will translate to more consistent content across the package’s discrete elements—and lower costs, too. Here’s another advantage of packaging these assignments together: It’s effectively a marketing checklist. By green-lighting a package, you eliminate the possibility of later discovering that you’d inadvertently left one element out. What’s the core asset? The components of any content package will be dissimilar, not in terms of facts or messaging, but rather in terms of sheer size. The package might include, say, an 800-word blog, along with a 280-character tweet (or X-chirp, or whatever it’s called nowadays). The point is, if you’re going to create all this stuff, know that it’s always easier to cut than to add. That matters, whether you’re creating the materials yourself or assigning them to someone else. In other words, you don’t start with the tweet. Identify the biggest, most detailed, and labor-intensive element in the package, and create that one first. Once it’s nicely honed, you can use it as a feeder for all of the others. It’s not quite as simple as doing a “Save as…” and then chopping down, because there are other constraints and style and audience factors to take into consideration. But still, all the heavy lifting should be done for the “core” asset. Example: We have a client who publishes case studies in a tightly-defined three-tab format (“Client,” “Team,” “Solution”). But they’ll also push out a more narrative-style blog about the same story—and the blog always has more detail, captioned illustrations, and little behind-the-scenes anecdotes baked into it. So we always do the blog first. Then the case study. Then the three-touch email campaign. Then the social teasers for the blog and the case study… you get the idea. Packaged goods As we’d mentioned earlier, creating content packages requires foresight and discipline. Foresight, in that you must often delay gratification, knowing that one element of the package may well roll out at some time in the future. And discipline, in that you must remember to employ the content-package approach, and stick to it. But, like any best practice, once you get used to doing this, you’ll find it becomes second nature… to the vast advantage of your marketing outreach, and your production budget. Need help “packaging” up any content, or creating the elements thereof? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you!  Great photo by Nathan Cowley This is a sensitive one. It’s based on a recent experience with a client of ours.
We need to exercise discretion here, but know that our client serves a certain target audience who is, well, for lack of a better word, suffering. Yes, suffering. No, this client of ours is not a personal-injury lawyer. Not a chiropractor. Not an undertaker. Nothing like that. They’re a professional-services firm that just so happens to specialize in helping out a very niche audience who is, by nature of their “situation,” out-and-out miserable. It’s the context of that “situation” which our client specializes in. Thus the audience of sufferers. This begs a bunch of questions:
Here’s why you should keep reading: These questions don’t just pertain to our super-specialized client. They also pertain to you. Believe it or not. To suffer or not to suffer We’ll spare you any suspense: We believe it’s absolutely appropriate to approach, and yes sell to, this audience. Of course that assertion comes loaded with caveats. But before we go there, let’s go here: How does this pertain to you? Who ever said your prospects are suffering? We did. Right here at Copel Communications. Think about it. If they weren’t suffering, they wouldn’t need your services. Here’s a kind of warped parallel: Ever see one of those “ghost-hunter” shows on TV? The ones where a group of “paranormal experts” descend upon some old house or hotel, and wire it up with equipment and recording devices, to try and capture the energy from long-dead spirits? If you have, great. If you haven’t, great. Because we’ll tell you the “secret ingredient” in all of these “reality” shows. (Boy did we ever smirk when we added the quotation marks to the word “reality,” but that’s the topic of another article.) Here’s the secret sauce, which all of these shows employ generously: If you think about the “team” of ghost-hunters, who do you think of? Exactly: People who are well-versed in the paranormal and the technology used to try and capture mysterious otherworldly behavior. People who know their history. People who are naturally curious, and certainly not afraid of the dark or things that go bump in the night. Wait. Scratch that. What? “People who are not afraid of the dark or things that go bump in the night.” Nope. Not a qualifier for these TV shows. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Watch any one of these. Sure, there will be a team of experts who are intrepid. But every time—trust us on this—there will be one person on that team who is utterly terrified of the dark, who jumps out of their skin at the slightest noise. Think about that. Why would you ever, ever, intentionally add a scaredy-cat to your ghost-hunting team? (Don’t worry. We’ll connect this to “suffering target audience” in just a second.) The answer: It makes for good television. Mind you, it’s not the professional ghost-hunters who choose Mister Scaredy-Cat to join their team. It’s the show’s producer. Because if the team were all nothing but ice-cool professionals, they would go in, do their job, get their info... ...and the show would be boring. Simple as that. Approach with caution If you watch any of these ghost-hunter shows, the best parts are when some door creaks, or a bat flies out of a pantry, and Mister Scaredy-Cat utterly leaps out of his skin and runs off screaming into the night, knocking down expensive equipment as he goes. It’s delightful. It’s funny. It’s fun to watch. And it gives you a little dosage of smug self-satisfaction as you think: I would never do that! And it keeps you watching the show, instead of switching the channel. So back to our client and their suffering audience. And at least as important, yours. If you only reach out to prospects who are the “professional ghost-hunters,” you’re barking up the wrong tree. To mix metaphors (one of our dubious skills here at Copel Comms), that tree is connected to the wrong sales funnel. The lower in the funnel, the more your prospects are suffering. Not necessarily personally (as is the case with our client), but certainly professionally. So. Now we can pick up the thread, and tell you how our client—with a little help from us—approached this delicate situation. Our client is truly empathetic. Spoiler alert: The principal is also a veteran/survivor of the exact same “situation” as their target audience. So they know what these prospects are going through. Importantly, they also know that there’s light at the end of the tunnel—something that none of these prospects can grasp, deep in the doldrums of despair. And that’s the way in. This is about comfort. It’s about succor. It’s about understanding. It’s about hope. Then it’s about professional expertise. About helping prospects face a difficult reality. It’s the delicate balance of “tough” and “love.” Now think about your prospects. We can safely assume they’re not as all-out depressed as our client’s prospects, but they’re still suffering, in their way. And this leads to some interesting creative/marketing approaches for you. Depending on the degree of “suffering,” you can dial up (or down) the level of comfort-and-compassion accordingly. But just knowing that opens up a new window, for you, to really reach these people, and connect with them at a much deeper level than you might ordinarily do through traditional approaches. And then, of course, once you’ve engaged with them—once you’ve gotten their attention—you can segue to the value that you bring. Which will end everyone’s professional suffering. Even yours. Need help unpacking challenges like this? Contact us. We’d be happy to help. |