 Great photo by Grok. “Blend word”?? What the heck is that?
More importantly, how can you make money off of one of these things? Let’s dive in. As is the case with lots of our articles here at Copel Communications, this one is based on a real client story. And as is the case with all of the real client stories we use as inspiration for articles, this one, like the others, has been anonymized for privacy purposes. But you’ll still get the gist. And the takeaways. Here’s the story: Recently, a client of ours wanted us to develop some pitch materials for a new business they were developing. Excitedly, they told that they’d already come up with a name for this new business, and were looking forward to registering a domain for it. The name of this new business (we’re modifying/anonymizing/making this up) was “Asset Protect.” “Asset Protect.” Hmmm. Well, you can guess, pretty accurately, what they do. So that’s good. But boy is that name ever generic. Which is not good. Can you guess where this story goes? Of course: Our client had one tough time registering that “unique” domain. “Asset Protect” had long been taken, by someone else, in an equally straightforward/uncreative foray. Portmanteau to the rescue To us, the solution to this problem was super simple. Employ a portmanteau or blend word. “Portmanteau” is about as funny a term as “blend word,” and you may not have heard of either. Not a problem. Because you know zillions of examples of these things, and you’ll say “Ohhh!” as soon as you read ones like:
We could go on forever. Applying this mashup concept to branding is equally well established and, we think, effective. Consider:
Need we go on? One of the reasons we mention this is because our frustrated client had considered inventing a totally new made-up name. That certainly comes with benefits: For example, if you invent something completely new, there won’t be any competition for it when it comes to registering your domain, and you’ll have rock-solid IP protection in the potential case of infringement. Still. The drawback is that that’s hard to do, for a basic small-to-midsized business. It takes a ton of (expensive) impressions for the whole world to know what you do. Consider:
Honestly. Would you have any idea what those companies do without their having invested zillions of dollars to inform you? So. The portmanteau/blend-word is a nice middle ground between the uninspired “Asset Protect” and the what-the-heck-is-that “Wazzibobo” or whatever. It’s not perfect. Because great minds think alike. If you’re launching a new brand and come up with what you think is the perfect portmanteau word for it, brace yourself. There’s a decent chance that someone else already came up with that one, and registered it, too. Not to worry. Keep on plugging. Or get help. Like us. Contact us for that next marketing assignment. We do things like this all the time, and would be delighted to help.
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 Great photo by Designecologist. We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging.
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! Website in the spotlight We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. Starting wide As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages! Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons:
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. Answer: No. Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours.  Great photo by Samson Katt. Every hear of a “paper edit”? Probably not.
Let’s dive, quickly, into the topic you tuned in for: Making the easiest marketing videos you’ll likely ever make. It gets better. They’ll also be among the least expensive to produce. And they’ll also be among the most powerful. Salivating yet? Let’s get started. Recycling is good for the planet… and your business A client of ours recently recently pitched a new prospect via a Zoom call. Specifically, they “ran the demo” of the company’s offerings, which included both a PowerPoint slide deck and a demo of specific SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings. The call went great. Our client closed the deal. What could be better than that? How about closing lots of deals? From the exact same call. You’re smart. You’re already way ahead of us here. Why do we even try to build any suspense? LOL! The key: Our client recorded the Zoom call. With the prospect’s permission, of course. Important point: the recording did not show the prospect on screen. Only our client, who was presenting. That recording is worth its weight in gold. It’s a verbatim capture of the best possible sales pitch, with our client hitting it out of the park. The entire video ran about 20 minutes. And in it, our client—the one who was running the demo—was making killer point after killer point, with each one nicely illustrated by either a powerful preso slide or quick SaaS demo. We watched this video, and realized that it was marketing gold, being served to us on a platter. The paper edit “Paper edit” is an old-school video editing term, which surprisingly isn’t so old-school or even outdated. It’s exactly what we created in this case. And it’s what you can do, too. (You know you’ve got some good recorded Zoom pitches by now. And if you don’t, you know you’re just itching to record your next one.) Here’s the task. Take that 20 minutes of raw footage, and convert it into as many little McNugget-sized videos as you can. They should run anywhere from about ten to 30 seconds each. So you just need to park the video in a window on one side of your screen, and a blank Word doc on the other. Watch the video and look for the organic “start” and “end” points of each little mini-video. Write down the time codes for each. Then come up with a title for that specific mini video. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ll have a “paper edit” which you can hand off, along with the big raw-footage file, to your favorite/least-expensive video editor. You will have done the heavy lifting; at this point, your editor simply needs to follow your instructions. They’ll need to create a master “set of bookends” first: This will be the opening title card, underlying music bed, and tail-end/call-to-action (CTA) title card. Once you approve those, you’re off to the races. Your editor will be able to crank these out like a machine. In our case, the 20 minutes of raw footage yielded more than 20 different short videos. They were so simple to create, that we didn’t even need our usual high-end editor for this assignment. Rather, we handed off the footage and the paper-edit doc to our client’s digital marketing firm; they were able to make these little vids for us—and put them to use, too, since they were able to easily fold them into the account’s digital marketing strategy. Sure, we continue to make slick, highly-produced videos for this same client. But they’re more expensive and less frequent. These little videos are awesome for keeping the world informed and teased, while easily building up your social presence on platforms like LinkedIn, simultaneously boosting the brand and impressions. Need help with an assignment like this, or others? 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 Fauxels. Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world).
Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. The cons Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. So… this better be one good meeting. Right? The pros After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in. But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. But later ain’t too bad, either. Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it.  Great photo by George Dolgikh You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit.
Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. Or do you? Or should you? In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. The cold-reality ROI argument You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back. So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer. Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. It’s the little things First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” Surprise and delight Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." Amount due? Zero. If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. Happy ending? So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it.  Great photo by Cottonbro Studio. Boy is this ever a “modern problems” topic. As a former agency creative director, we’re used to, well, directing creative people.
But nowadays, very often, you can’t. You can’t speak to them. You can’t see them. And yet you need to direct, and coach, and motivate them, to do their best work. What gives? The gig economy cometh Back in the day, we’d walk around the bull pen and engage with our artists at their drawing boards (yikes!) and computers. We’d go to recording studios and direct voiceover talent and jingle artists. We’d direct photographers on photo shoots, videographers on video shoots, and so on. Very straightforward. Enter Upwork. And Fiverr. And their ilk. The vaunted “Gig Economy,” wherein people can work, and make money, from anywhere. We’ve weighed in on this topic before. It’s a double-edged blade, which democratizes the availability of talent purveyors to buyers, while also (often) encouraging a race-to-the-bottom mentality when it comes to pricing and (often) quality. We won’t get into that here. What we will get into is the way that these platforms, such as Upwork and Fiverr, force you to work. They expressly forbid the talent on their platforms from engaging with the people who hire them… outside of the limited messaging capabilities of the platform itself. Think about that. We’ve had some tricky video assignments, for example, which we needed to dole out to qualified editors. The requirements for success were nuanced. Know the best way to communicate this to the editor? How about a phone call? Or better yet, Zoom? Nope. Not allowed by Upwork. Or Fiverr. (To the point where they’ll banish these workers from their platforms if they’re caught engaging in such egregious violations of their terms and conditions. The platforms are effectively dangling their livelihoods on a string.) So what do we do? How do we surmount these challenges? Is it possible to make lemonade from such tainted fruit? The pen is mightier than the restraint There’s really only one tool at your disposal if you’re looking to get great work out of these gig-economy vendors. And that’s the written word. Imagine that rousing speech and directions you’d planned (or hoped) to give that vendor in person. Write it down. Verbatim. It’s your only/best choice. Sure, you can, and should, list all the mandatories in the project (“The logo must stay on screen for at least four seconds,” etc.). But you need to put the “carrots” in there, too. We’ve ended some lengthy directions with exhortations such as, “If this one comes out great, there will be others in this series. So impress us!” You’re not some HAL-like computer spitting out commands. You’re a person, doing your best to connect to that vendor on the other side of the gig-platform wall. Be nice. Make friends. And don’t be surprised if the street isn’t exactly two-way. You may spend, say, an hour writing up an incredible input package. And you may get in return something as succinct as “ok got it thx.” Don’t be offended. Just roll with it. You don’t need, say, that graphic artist to spend an hour or two on a beautifully written reply; rather, you want them to devote their time to making beautiful graphics, following your instructions in both letter and spirit. Need help getting the best out of a hybrid team like this? Contact us. We do this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too!  Have you tallied up your totals for your Schedule C? If not, you might want to consider some of the categories we’ll cover in this quick tax-time edition of our usual article series.
Of course we’d be remiss if we didn’t open this one with the obligatory disclaimer: We’re not accountants. We rely on the services of people who are. That said, we can pore through receipts and organizers as well as anyone, so here are some categories to consider before you hand off that big stack of paperwork to your CPA with the time-tested plea: “Find as much as you legally can!”
How can you come out ahead? As we’d mentioned at the outset of this article, we’re not accountants. Once you gather up your info, do like we do, hand it off to the pros. That said, there are ways we can help you save. If you’re investing too much time, money, or effort in your marketing, writing, or creative services, let us help. You’ll find that our work is first-rate, our service is cheerful, and our rates are hardly (*groan*) taxing. Contact us today. |