Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building. We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? Audience first If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. Working backward So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. How did they differ from us? Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. Outline, outline, outline Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this:
Close, close, close Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time.
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Landing new business is exciting. It means new assignments, and a new source of revenue. What’s not to get excited about? We worked with a client recently on some customer-discovery work, and found, counterintuitively, that almost the exact opposite was true. That was the case for them. It may well be the case for you, too. Let’s explain. Who wants what? As part of our near-religious passion for taking a customer-back approach to everything we do here at Copel Communications, we were helping this client of ours—a niche consultancy—to develop their new website by first determining who they wanted it to reach. So far, so straightforward. Now, we need to clothe the details here in anonymity, but we can still make this story clear enough for you to understand and profit from. Historically, this client of ours had worked with various types of customers, whom we were defining as avatars—or, more colloquially, “putting into buckets.” Among those buckets were the “Go-Getters”: the really aggressive customers who offer high reward… for commensurately high risk and high maintenance. There were the “Tire Kickers.” They weren’t an obvious group, at first; it took a lot of discussion to tease them out. But once we did, we realized that we didn’t want to attract any of these energy vampires to the business. (We have an entire article on this topic, which you’ll enjoy.) The third bucket (are you sensing the Goldilocks vibe here?) was what we ended up calling the "Lovably Boring” cohort. They were exactly that: Steady, meticulous, detailed, risk-averse… yet honest, straightforward, trustworthy, and reliable. Bingo. They automatically became our client’s prime target. Weighing the cost and effort to attract, sign, and service them, vs. the revenue and profit potential vs. the other buckets, it became crystal clear… in hindsight, of course. It took a bunch of modeling and number-crunching to reach this conclusion. But once we got there, it was great. You (may) know the old adage: “Speak to the target. Let the others listen.”That was the case here. (Granted, the “Tire Kickers” were kicked right out of the room.) Catering to the un-exciting You might conclude, somewhat logically, that reaching this “boring” audience would itself be a boring assignment. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we’ve said, taking a customer-back approach makes things not easy, but straightforward. And in the case of our “lovingly boring” target audience, it actually made it fun. Imagine: Climb into the head of that super-cautious prospect. What gets them excited? Things like safety and peace of mind. What freaks them out? Things like risky approaches and high-pressure sales. Aha. From here, it became downright enjoyable to create this safe, Eden-like online oasis for this group. Knowing their personalities, and needs, made it straightforward for us to determine what kind of language to use… what kinds of fonts, colors, background video music, amount of white space… all of it. The lesson here is to really follow that customer-back approach. That customer’s values might not align with your values. But you’re not selling to yourself. You’re selling to them. And what, after all, could be more exciting than converting a boring prospect into a paying customer? Need help with customer-discovery challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help! From bots to AI, everyone’s in a tizzy about this new technology which threatens to take over the world, eliminating vast swaths of good-paying jobs as it goes. And yes, we did use the word “tizzy.” Here’s the thing. This is a two-way street. There’s an inherent creative challenge here that no one is talking about. And that’s making the positive case for this technology, which—spoiler alert—often saves jobs, rather than displacing them. We know. We toil in these trenches quite often. So what’s this all about? Let’s take a second to discuss these supposedly-evil technologies before we weigh in on how to portray them, positively, from a creative standpoint. Broadly, the two we’ll discuss here are robotic process automation, or RPA; and artificial intelligence, or AI. Quickly and purposely over-simplified:
Honestly: Does any of that make you shake in your shoes? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We’re not any more threatened by these than we are by a word processor. They’re just tools. Powerful tools. And that’s why they’re making such a big splash nowadays. They’re new. So there’s a fear-of-the-unknown factor at work. The good news We have a client that custom-builds lots of AI-powered bots. And we help to promote them in various media. So the age-old creative challenge goes something like this: How do you “portray” a bot that you’d like to sell, knowing that it’s actually an evil job-killer? This would have you asking yourself things like: “Should we even portray it at all?” and “Do we even mention this evil technology?” Well, we’d spoiled this above, and so we’ll dive in here. This technology, this tool, is hardly evil. And in the majority of the use-cases that we’re tasked with promoting, they’re a downright godsend to the people who “work side-by-side” with them. How is that? Imagine you’re a worker. Sitting at your computer all day. Doing tons and tons of drudge work, like creating reports using data from one system, and manipulating it in another and doing all this stuff, over and over, because none of the systems talk to each other and, importantly, all this drudge work is eating up the time you’d rather be devoting to the more important and fulfilling parts of your job, such as serving clients or customers or developing new solutions. Wouldn’t you love it if you could simply flip a switch, and all of the work, in your day, that you hate-hate-hate, magically goes away? That’s what happens. You’ll never see this in the news, because it isn’t scary, and the media’s job is to try and scare you in order to keep you clicking. But workers who get bots not only love them; they actually show them off to their co-workers, who each want their own. Talk about viral. The creative challenge that solves itself All of the above discussion was not a digression. To the contrary: It was the setup for solving the initial creative challenge. The answer, as you can now see, is to address this one head-on: In other words, feel free to depict this technology as friendly, as an assistant, a life-changing development like the microwave oven or the cell phone. Thus, we routinely work on marketing materials which, yes, personify and anthropomorphize RPA bots. And they’re all portrayed as eager, friendly helpers. Incidentally, this entire tale is a great example of taking a customer-back approach to a creative challenge. Once you know what the end customer (in this case, the worker who could benefit from the addition of an AI-powered bot) needs, the way of expressing the solution, creatively, becomes not easy… but straightforward. Need help with challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you. 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! True story: We worked with a client recently who wanted our help, using a shared online Word doc, to rework the copy for one page of marketing material: a website page. The Word doc had a headline at the top. And then a big page of body copy. This was the client’s original, rough draft. As we’d noted, they wanted our help wordsmithing it. This client had booked us, via Zoom, for a one-hour screen-share meeting. And guess what? We spent pretty much the entire meeting just working on the headline. To you creatives out there, this is hardly shocking. But to this person who was an employee at our client and was new to this process, it was shocking. In this article, we'd like to cover 1) why this person was so shocked, 2) why headline writing is so hard, and 3) how you can lubricate the process. Two hands on the paintbrush To be clear: In the story we described above, we were forced to work slower than we usually do. Because we couldn’t just dive into our process; rather, we had to explain our process, at each step, before we undertook each step. So that took a lot more time and was, candidly, rather draining. It’s hard enough to do the work; it’s even harder to do it and describe how you’re doing it at the same time. In other words, a tip of the hat to Bob Ross! As we’ve noted before (specifically in this article), shared Word docs are a double-edged sword, which have a habit of cutting you more than others! Still, let’s discuss why the headline part of this assignment required so much more time than the ensuing body copy; we didn’t even sweat the latter. And that’s part of the reason. With body copy, you’ve got lots of time and space and leeway to make your point. A headline is the opposite. You have just a few words. Plus, a headline needs to be, well, “headline-y.” It has to read like a headline. It has to look good on the page. And it has to sound good in your head—to your inner ear. It needs a good rhythm. And cadence. It must convey the exact right tone: if one word is off, it collapses. Oh, and it should be clever. Good luck with that! Tools for your box A way to help you surmount this challenge—in fact, a few of the component parts at once—is to start with something familiar. If there’s something familiar that rings true, and you can spin it your way, then you’ve got a great headline, seemingly ready-made. Don’t believe us? Look at Apple. Every headline on their website is written to try and meet this exact goal. An example from our business: We wrote a headline for a consultancy that helps businesses transform by using a library of proven templates. The headline we wrote for a page describing that process was: Reinvent your business. Not the wheel. Why does that headline work? It’s the exact same approach we’d just described. Everyone knows the expression, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” But no one had spun it this way before: a ripe opportunity for us, and our client. Anyway, we’d promised you some tools for your box, so here goes. When it comes to headline-writing, lean, liberally, on tools such as:
That person who joined us on the Zoom call was kind-of shocked to follow us down these exact same rabbit holes. They didn’t realize that it took this much time and effort… just to write a headline that’s only a few words long. Know why? Because you can read a good headline in about two seconds. By that token, you can look at a great painting in the same amount of time. Need help with headline-writing? Contact us. It’s a specialty of ours. It’s that time of year again: Time for the annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. This one is the former. (We’d published the other one recently.) Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of tips and tricks that you can put to use ASAP. Enjoy!
That wraps up this year. And so… Happy New Year! Any topics you’d like to see us address in 2024? Contact us and let us know! This dilemma is surprisingly common among our clientele of B2B consultants here at Copel Communications: They’ll get prospects arriving into the sales funnel. They’ll spend time and effort cultivating and qualifying them. And yet those prospects will turn into either 1) deadbeats who don’t convert, or 2) clients who are so much work and hassle that they’re not worth the time. Uggh. Has this ever happened to you? Of course it has. In this article, we’ll dive a little more deeply into this problem; more importantly, we’ll tell you how to address it—to head it off in advance—so the likelihood of your ever confronting it again plummets. Who are the tire kickers? And why do they kick? Excuse us, but we can’t make any assumptions here. There’s a decent chance that you don’t know the origin of the phrase “tire kicker,” so we’re obligated to explain it. Quite simply, it refers to someone who, in the old days, would visit a new car showroom and take up the salesperson’s time, seemingly checking out a car they’d like to purchase (literally kicking the tires to test them for soundness), and then walking out, without making a purchase, much to the salesperson’s chagrin. The common assumption, at least in automotive retail (and we’ve worked in advertising for this space, so we have some experience here) is that these tire-kickers simply don’t have any money in their pockets in the first place. Maybe they just like to get a good whiff of that new-car smell. Maybe they just like to sadistically waste sales reps’ time. Regardless, they would (and certainly still do) trickle into auto showrooms, and it was incumbent on the sales reps themselves to identify these tire-kickers in order to avoid the wasteful time-suck they would present. This is not a tangent. The story above has everything to do with your B2B marketing. Clone wars We had a client in the tech space who complained to us that lots of the work they were doing was effectively clean-up of technical messes made by lesser-skilled (read: “Upwork”) technicians on projects where they’d been hired by clients seeking to cut costs. Burned by those poor technicians, these same clients would then turn to our client to “clean up this mess.” And our client hated-hated-hated it. Interestingly, they also didn’t turn it down. (Feel familiar? It’s not an uncommon trap.) Anyway, this tech client of ours was looking to do some re-branding, and as part of our customer-discovery effort, we asked them (just as we’d ask you), “What kinds of customers do you have now that you’d love to clone?” It’s a great question. Devote some nice biz-dev time to answering it. It also sets up the flip side: “Which kinds of customers do you have now that you’d love to avoid and never see again?” Well, you certainly know how our tech client answered this question. (In case you were curious, they were willing to finish any existing projects with these “energy vampire” clients and their technical clean-up jobs, but didn’t want to actively attract any new ones in the future.) This leads to the branding. It leads to how you can head off these energy vampires at the pass. And yes, it ties right back to that automotive showroom story we’d spun above. Cleanup on Web Page Four While this article pertains to overall branding (including all the vehicles and mediums you’ll employ to fill your sales funnel), let’s drill down to your website as an easy-to-illustrate example. Let’s ask you one simple question: Does it look conducive to tire-kickers? Aha! In other words, there’s a very simple way to dissuade these personae non gratae, and get them to self-select their way... elsewhere. Here’s the analogy: What happens when your Toyota Corolla buyer accidentally walks into a Lexus showroom? He looks around sheepishly. Blinks. Hands up. Apologizes to the approaching high-end sales rep: “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize I... was...” And he quietly backs out the door. On his own. So if you want to avoid the Corolla buyer (nothing against them, or Corollas, for that matter), make your website the equivalent of the Lexus showroom. We have another client who wants customers with at least $100k to spend on their services. And they clearly don’t want to run a headline above-the-fold proclaiming “Great Services If You Have At Least $100k To Spend.” Of course not. But they totally got the “Lexus showroom” idea when we pitched it to them; combined with upscale messaging which addresses the problems of their ideal prospect, it makes the whole experience self-selecting for the great targets... as well as those who should politely exit the premises. That’s not mean. It’s actually helpful. For those who can’t afford our client’s services, it saves them time and aggravation, too. They don’t want to learn more about stuff they can’t afford. Unless they’re actual tire-kickers who simply enjoy the sadistic abuse of sales reps. They’re out there. You can’t avoid them entirely. But you can make the others go away. So you can focus your efforts on the ones you’d love to clone. Need help with customer-filtering challenges like these? Contact us today. We’d be delighted to help. You’ll like this story. It’s useful. Recently we were working with a client to help them strategize the new branding for their business. Granted, we need to purposely “fuzz-ify” the details here, so for the purposes of this story, let’s make two broad points: 1) The new branding was for a B2B service-based business. (Feel familiar to you?) 2) The name was something like “Rocket-Speed Consulting.” That’s totally made up, and not the name, but again, it will help us tell this story to you. This client had already created some “1.0” branding which they shared with us. As you can likely imagine from what we’d just described, the logo featured a picture of a rocket ship. And every single offering from this company was named something like “Flight Speed Service,” or “Supersonic Payload Power,” or “Blast-Off Engagement.” What’s wrong with that, you might ask? To mix metaphors (one of our dubious skills here at Copel Communications), this got our Spidey Sense tingling to the point where we had a Vietnam flashback. A higher power Ages ago, there was a car company called Saturn. You might not remember it. It was actually owned and launched by General Motors, with much fanfare. It was a really innovative brand, and car, and gained a loyal following for quite some time. For example, they introduced the concept of no-haggle pricing. Their car doors weren’t stamped sheet metal, but rather plastic: One of their TV commercials showed a supermarket shopping cart smacking into the side of a parked Saturn, only to bounce off, with the dented door of the car magically popping back into shape without so much as a scratch. They had a pretty logo, too. It was a square, with a minimalist illustration of the planet Saturn, with its signature rings, cropped within the square. Red and white. With the name “Saturn” underneath. Very nicely executed. So what’s this have to do with Spiderman? And Vietnam? Our Spidey Sense tingled, because there was something about all this “Rocket-Speed” 1.0 branding that didn’t feel quite right. And we experienced a Vietnam flashback, because this reminded of us one day, back in the day, when we toiled at an ad agency in New York. Inner vs. outer space That ad agency did a lot of “automotive retail advertising,” which is code for “screaming car dealership ads.” One day, we were working on a print ad for a Saturn dealership (see? it’s coming full-circle), and consulted the manufacturer’s ad planner to help us. Uh-oh. Jargon alert. What’s an “ad planner”? Back in the day, these would be printed books. Full of artwork and logos you could use in dealership ads, along with copious guidelines detailing what you could and couldn’t do in those ads. Today, these don’t exist as printed books, any more than Saturn exists as a car company. But branding guidelines live on. They’re important. They’re huge. Anyway, there was one page in this Saturn ad planner which showed what you could and couldn’t do in any ads. And it said, quite plainly: “No stars or planets.” Huh? Now, a typical guideline for ads like these will dictate that you use their logo, as a measuring stick, and be required to allow a certain number of logo-widths around it, as white space, to elevate it, to prevent clutter. To protect the brand. That’s common. And it was the case for Saturn, too. But no stars? No planets? Just as Saturn didn’t want to muddy up their branding with visual elements impinging upon the logo’s “breathing space” on a page (or screen), they also didn’t want to muddy up the powerful feelings that are implicit in the name “Saturn” by calling attention to it as a planet in the solar system. Think about that. That’s brilliant. “Saturn” means something to you. It’s cool. It’s beautiful. It’s hinted at in the logo. But not one of their ads mentions planets or stars. It’s forbidden. It would cheapen the brand. Can you think of another brand that does this today? Hint: Their logo also looks like a familiar object. Yet they make no reference to that type of object in any of their advertising. You guessed it. Apple. Their logo looks like an apple. Replete with a bite taken out of it. (Legend has it that the “bite” was added because without it, the original looked too much like a cherry.) But you’ll never see any mention of “fruit” or “juice” or “trees” in any of their advertising. Same reason. (The closest they came to that was naming the Macintosh, back in 1984, which is an intentional misspelling of the McIntosh variety of apple. But as you know, it’s only ever called a “Mac” these days.) Helping our client Fresh from our Vietnam flashback (which should give you a hint of what those New York days were like), we were able to tell this story, and make this suggestion, to our client: Keep the “Rocket Ship” name. But nix every other “rocket” reference in the sub-branding. Protect the brand. Elevate it. Don’t cheapen it. This client of ours is very smart. They got it immediately. And they implemented it, too. Today, their branding is very clean, smart, and dare we say, Apple-like. Need help with a branding challenge for your business? This story, and lesson, are just one small sliver of the type of support we offer. Contact us today to learn more. We’d love to hear from you. If you’re seeking to create an all-new website for your business, one of the first things you’ll need to build is what’s called the wireframe. The definition of creating a website wireframe is the process of using different tools—primarily software—to develop a multi-level framework view of how the site will be constructed, including which types of content will live on the various sections and pages. That may sound complicated. In fact, we’ve seen lots of ad agencies and web-design firms who actually make it complicated. Thing is, it needn’t be. Thus this article. If you’re trying to create a new (or updated) website for your business, you want to make that new site as powerful and business-building as possible—and you also want to get it up-and-running yesterday. Perhaps those agencies and design firms we’d mentioned above are looking to justify their hefty fees. We’ve seen big, sprawling wireframes that look like the org chart from the Department of Defense, with connectors and boxes and dashed lines and finicky labels and all that. Yeesh. We’d noted “software,” above, and there are certainly apps and platforms out there to help you create the kind of graphical spaghetti mess we just described. If that’s the type of solution you’re seeking, stop reading right here. This article won’t help you. Still with us? Glad to have you. Here’s the real way to create a quick-and-dirty wireframe for your upcoming website. Two camps First, we need to address some trends in web design that will affect this assignment. Broadly, there are two ways, these days, to build your website, in terms of how it’s structured:
The latter way of proceeding, it’s been argued, is better for mobile-first audiences, who don’t want to keep opening new windows while they navigate. The traditional way, by contrast, is great for desktop and laptop audiences. We won’t weigh in on which one we prefer; that’s the topic of a different article. But once you choose the way you’d like your site to be structured, you still need to create that wireframe. The only difference between the two modalities is that one wireframe will indicate links for actual pages and sub-pages; the other will indicate “links” for placeholders to scroll to on that one huge page. Center stage The other big consideration, when it comes to website design (and thus your wireframe) is that not all website pages (or sections) are created equal. (For the remainder of this article, we’ll refer to “pages,” for simplicity’s sake, but know that everything we’ll discuss applies to both types of sites.) What’s “unequal”? There are two huge things to consider, based on the valid assumption that your visitor is basically in a hurry to find out what they need to learn about your business, and if they’re not satisfied quickly, they’ll click off to one of your competitors. So here are the two huge things:
So you need to treat those two areas with extra-special care. Deeper sub-pages, such as “Company History,” aren’t as urgent. Who’s there? As we’ve said a zillion times in these articles, the primary, A-1 consideration for all your marketing—including your website—is understanding who your target audience is, and what they need. That’s a huge given for this website assignment; for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that you’ve figured that out nicely. From there, it’s pretty straightforward to create your wireframe. You know you’ll need a home page. And some sub-pages. You’ll need to determine the order, in importance, of those sub-pages, and which ones cluster together in order to simplify navigation. But how do you build this? What about all that fancy whiz-bang wireframe software? Think big, act small This is so ridiculously easy we’re amazed that more agencies don’t use it. The answer: Microsoft Word. All you have to do is create a blank page with a couple of basic bullets on it, such as:
That’s it. Should take you all of about 15 seconds. Then here’s the cool, easy, and downright fun part: Simply start populating each of those bullets with sub-bullets. When you do this in Word, simply hit the “Tab” key underneath any given bullet, and Word will automatically indent and format the sub-bullets for you, outline-style. So, starting with really easy stuff, let’s add the next layer to the “Home page” bullet. That would go like this:
You can worry about what populates those sub-bullets later. Here’s another. Let’s start populating the “Services” sub-bullets:
And you just keep on going, adding to it until it’s done. You can always do a “Save as...” and create a v2, v3, whatever you like, in order to preserve earlier versions (and thinking) and build a creative audit trail. You can even start dropping in chunks of copy, such as headlines and teaser intro’s, into this wireframe. One more trick: We’ve often helped clients build websites in a phased fashion. That is, there’s some stuff that needs to get published immediately (Phase One), vs. other pages that can be rolled out at a future date (Phase Two). So we’ll use color-coding (again, in Word) to make that clear to the reader without even reading it. We’ve set, for example, the most urgent pages in a red font so they stand out. Easy. This process is really simple. But don’t let that fool you. It’s hugely powerful. We’ve used it to help clients create all kinds of websites, big and small. Need help ideating that new site or the client needs it will address? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. Let’s dive right into this. It’s based on a disheartening episode we recently experienced with a client. Here’s the story: We’d been working, for months, with this client, to develop their new brand persona, by taking a meticulous customer-back approach to their business. And by “customer-back,” we mean, “starting with the customer—who they are, what they need—and then working back into all of the messaging and, indeed, offerings.” Done right, this is a powerful process. With this client, we did it right. We were developing some killer insights that would position our client head-and-shoulders above all their competitors. This positioning, then, informed the structure and content of the new website we were creating for them. (“Disheartening”? Stay with us.) So. We did the deep-dive customer-discovery work with them. We developed the new brand persona. We developed the strategy, and then the wireframe (“outline”) for the website. All of these were approved by the client. Then, using the approved wireframe, we wrote all the pages of the website for them. These, too, were heartily approved by the client. Everything was going swimmingly. Cart? Horse? Huh? Then, one day, the client surprised us by sending us a brochure to review. This was certainly a surprise: “brochure” hadn’t been discussed before. But that’s fine. We’re not parochial. We can go with the flow. If clients want to take the initiative and bolster their marketing, we’re all for it. Until we saw this brochure. Mind you, it was finished. Outlined, written, and laid out. The client told us they wanted to send it out, en masse, and wanted our quick review/sign-off before it went. Holy @#$#@$. Our first reaction was Who is this brochure for?? Yep, it was that far off of everything that had been previously, and laboriously, developed... and then approved. Yikes. There was not a sentence, not an image, not a pixel in this thing that was on-brand or on-message. It told a different, and confusing story. The imagery would have been off-putting to the specific target audiences we had worked so hard to define. The structure was confusing. The layout was amateurish: like a mediocre student project. There was no call-to-action. It was, in short, a train wreck. Tough love Now, we’ve seen lots of mediocre, and downright bad, marketing materials in our time. So along that continuum, this one was hardly a shocker or a standout. But what did make it so extraordinary was the way in which it simply disregarded all of the painstaking, groundbreaking work that had preceded it. Not only would it turn off the very people it was supposed to turn on, it—most importantly—squandered all of the effort that went into the main branding and site-building. We don’t enjoy giving tough love here at Copel Communications, but we also don’t shy away from it when it’s required. Here, it was required. It was not fun to tell this client that, while we appreciated all of the effort that clearly went into this thing, it would do more harm than good, and should simply be shelved. Ouch. So now you know the “disheartening” part of this article. But what about the “Steal from yourself” headline? Play it on the cheap You probably figured it out for yourself already. Between the prior branding, and especially the website and its already-written pages, this client already had everything they needed to quickly create a killer brochure, practically for free. It was the same messaging. In just a slightly different format. Indeed, it’s even easier: You don’t know how a visitor is going to poke around the different pages of your website. But they’ll start reading that brochure from the front cover, and turn through it, page-by-page, in order, until they reach the end. So it’s very straightforward to populate the thing, especially when you have all of the content and images already on hand. They’re not only polished and powerful. They’re paid for. And thus the “steal, steal, steal” advice we have to offer here: Steal from every great marketing piece you have, to create other great marketing pieces. Fine. We’ll be polite. We can say “leverage,” if you like. Fact is, too many clients get so caught up in their own marketing materials that they feel compelled to create something new every single time, when reality dictates the exact opposite: Never flatter yourself into thinking that some prospect has not only read, but memorized your entire website, and then will be put off, or offended, when they review your brochure which includes, effectively, the exact same content. So our client’s mistake here wasn’t uncommon. This was the trap they fell into. They just fell a lot harder than most. Their biggest mistake: Opting to “surprise us” while they worked on this thing—from ideation through completion—in the background. Boy, could we ever have nipped this in the bud—and saved them a ton of headaches, aggravation, time, and most especially money—in the process. Use web content for brochures. Leverage brochures for social ads. Use print copy for radio. Sales-sheet images for case studies. Video-script voiceover text for emails. It just goes on and on. Steal, steal, steal. One other way to look at this: If you do the opposite, you diminish your brand. You’ve got all these disparate looks and messages, and no target will ever connect those dots. But when it’s all unified and coordinated—which is actually easier, and less effort—your brand appears huge, unavoidable, and inevitable. Need help with branding challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! |
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