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!
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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. No that’s not a brand of beer. When we refer to “Draft Number 10,” we’re talking about Word docs. Oh. Which begs the question: Why embrace that? Just by its moniker, “Number 10,” it’s daunting and annoying. Who in their right mind would ever enjoy, let alone embrace, the tenth draft of anything? Wouldn’t you be automatically burned out? Let’s answer that “in their right mind” question first. This is business, not art If you’re a painter or a poet, up in your garret, you can dream and wile away the hours, finessing your grand opus—“a hundred visions and revisions,” in the words of T.S. Eliot—and you’ve only yourself (and perhaps your muse) to answer to. But we’re not talking about art here, despite our decades of experience (not to mention lots of awards) in creative services. We’re talking about business. Money. Deadlines. ROI. Where, then, does a Draft Number 10 even come from? Quick oh-now-you’ll-get-it answer: A client who’s a perfectionist. Aha. Now everything should make sense for you. We have a client—we’ve actually had lots of clients like this—who’s a perfectionist. Who will revise and revise and revise a draft until it’s almost perfect… and then decide that it’s anything but, and then trash it, and start over, and then revise and revise and revise again, taking us along for the ride. As a creative resource, you could fight this. But you know that that would get you in trouble, and perhaps fired. You could just go with the flow: “Oh, this is the way they like to work. I’ll just… endure it, without complaining.” It’s possible that you could coast along like this indefinitely. But neither of the above approaches benefits anybody. Thus our advice to you in these situations: Embrace it. Heck, enjoy it. See it for the invaluable paid education that it is: Our fastidious client in this story—like most of the clients we’re lucky to work with, whether they’re fastidious or not—is quite brilliant. We would pay to learn their thought processes. To try and osmose just a tiny bit of that genius. Why do they toss Draft 5 and do a wholesale rework for Draft 6? Incidentally, the method behind the madness reveals—if you pay attention—that overall, these drafts get better as they go. It’s not a simple straight slope, were you to graph it. But the trend would be positive. Put it this way: Wouldn’t you love to see Einstein’s notes en route to e = mc2? We get paid for our services. It’s incumbent on us to remain profitable. So we don’t lose money on assignments like this—while, at the same time, we don’t take advantage of our clients’ generosity. And while we get paid in dollars, often the greater reward is the knowledge. The insight. And, frankly, the ability to help other clients like this in similar situations. As we’d said, we’re not along simply for the ride. We dive right in, on every single draft, seeing what’s changed and doing our best to make it better throughout. That’s why our clients entrust us on this journey. Need help with a client, or project, that feels unending? Contact us. We’d be happy—truly happy—to help. 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! ChatGPT, as you know, was huge news about a year ago. So why are we writing about it now? Now is a good time. All the hype has evaporated. All the dust has settled. We can now discuss ChatGPT without the breathless hyperbole, without all the doom-and-gloom forebodings of the apocalypse. Quick teaser: We use ChatGPT. And so should you. Qualifier: When it’s appropriate, and useful, to do so. Let’s dive in. What it is… and isn’t When ChatGPT hit the scene, everyone with a pulse was accosting us about this supposed existential threat to our business here at Copel Communications. Wouldn’t we be subsumed by this marching monster that threatened all creative jobs? No. We weren’t afraid of it then. We’re not afraid of it now. Ignorance is what breeds fear. Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds power. We’ll take the latter any day of the week. ChatGPT, quite simply, is a tool. Just like a hammer. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. It’s only as good as the person using it. You wouldn’t hand a hammer to a surgeon. (Or if you do, run.) The surgeon knows what tools to use. ChatGPT is no different. As a large-language model, it’s capable of stringing together astonishingly coherent sentences in technically excellent English. (Detect our qualifiers there?) It “knows” tons of stuff, effectively from scouring the entire internet (more qualifiers forthcoming). And it’s fast: Ask it something, and it answers. Instantly. All of which begs the question: Is ChatGPT creative? Oh come on. See what difference a year makes? Of course it’s not. It never was. It’s not even intended to be. It’s a tool. We were asked, many years ago, when Apple introduced iMovie, if Hollywood movies would be going away. See? You’re laughing. Because 1) they didn’t go away, and 2) they weren’t exactly threatened by iMovie. To the contrary: A pro version of iMovie (called Final Cut Pro) came out, and many Hollywood editors embraced it. They still do. So now, with all the hype in the rearview mirror, it’s easy—and often quite useful—to embrace ChatGPT. That said, there are some caveats. Some caveats ChatGPT doesn’t “know” everything. As the site itself will warn you, it’s only scoured the internet up through April, 2023. After that, it’s clueless. So don’t expect any recent information in its database. It’s also a classic case of the old computing adage, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or GIGO. There’s a lot of bad, and biased information out there on the internet (really??), and ChatGPT has Hoovered it all up with nary a hiccup. It will spit out the same junk, to you, that it’s sucked up, from others. And ChatGPT doesn’t have a “B.S. meter.” Sometimes, it will flat-out lie. We’ve tested it. So can you. It’s easy. (We’d asked it, for example, to name some famous dialogue quotes from a movie we have effectively memorized. And while it listed several good quotes, it also spat out others that had nothing to do with that movie whatsoever. And no “red underlining,” as you’ll find in Word for a suspiciously-misspelled word. As far as fact-checking goes, you’re on your own.) The good stuff Granted, we don’t use ChatGPT every day. To the contrary: We hardly use it at all. But every now and then, we’ll get an assignment that’s easy to hand off to ChatGPT. And to be clear: We will tell our clients whenever we use ChatGPT. We do this for many reasons:
So what kinds of assignments are good for ChatGPT? In our experience, it’s great for coming up with lots of “ideas” for basic things that have already been ideated by others. That’s a huge distinction. (It’s like the “technically excellent English,” we’d mentioned above—which checks all the boxes for spelling and grammar, but hasn’t an iota of creativity to it.) Some examples:
Now, it’s incumbent on you to ask ChatGPT in the best way possible in order to get the information you seek. We’re good at it; we have a nice feel for how it was programmed, and thus can effectively “reverse-engineer” our prompts. So ChatGPT is like Word. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. Just another tool in our kit. Need help with that next assignment—whether it requires ChatGPT or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 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! Turkey and stuffing are traditions, so why not a blog about what we’re thankful for? This is kind of an unintentional tradition here at Copel Communications, but the stuff we’re thankful for evolves each year. We post this not just to share the love, but also to inspire. What are you thankful for? Is there stuff that we list below which you’d overlooked? More important, what have we invariably overlooked? Please chime in, in the comments. Creature comforts We’ll do anything and everything we can to get those creative juices flowing each day. That’s actually one of the perks of this job. We get to indulge ourselves in a cocoon-like office space, with everything desirable all within arm’s reach. Ready?
Saving the best for last You should be able to figure out where this is going. Everything we’d bulleted above, while great, is stuff. What are we most thankful for? Of course. It’s people. We’re talking about the great creative folk we have the good fortune to work with among our constellation of vendors. We’re talking about the fantastic clients we’re lucky to serve every day: they keep us challenged and stimulated, and always fail to appreciate just how much free education they shower upon us with their subject-matter expertise. And then what is Thanksgiving without giving thanks to family? It’s why we do anything, everything, that we do. What are you thankful for? Let us know directly, or simply add your thoughts to the Comments below. Oooh. Now there’s an intriguing title, isn’t it? Especially if it’s posted by Copel Communications, where we specialize in writing. How can you say organized without reading? Think about it. Everything you employ to stay organized—such as calendars, emails, and files—all require reading. Is there some secret trick? Why it’s hard There are countless articles out there about getting your business organized. And lots of them are self-serving: They’re basically promoting Slack, or Asana, or Evernote, or Things, or Monday, or Trello, or OmniFocus, or Habitica, or Notion, or Todoist, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So we’ll go you one better. Not only will we show you how to get better organized without reading, we’ll also show you how to do it without purchasing any new apps. Take that, Slack! Or Asana. Or Evernote. Or.... well, you get the idea. What don’t you read? There are basic sensory inputs that you can use, and respond to, which don’t require reading. There are, we suppose, scents. Or even tastes. But we’re not going to suggest lemon-flavored sticky notes. (Do those even exist?) Stay with us on this. (If you’re not ahead of us already.) There are sounds. Come to think of it, you already rely on a ton of these all the time. There are alerts for every time you get a text message. Or an email. And of course when your phone rings. There are even little sound effects embedded within LinkedIn: when you successfully make a post or reach out to a connection, you'll hear a little click or warble. Conceivably, you could use sounds to help you get organized; you could create your own, and link them to certain events, and spend you day, Pavlov-like, waiting for the next ding. Naaah. That ain’t it. There are also tactile cues. If you have low vision, you may already rely on a Braille reader. Your phone likely has haptic feedback: When you type or select an icon, you can feel a little click or buzz to help reinforce the action. That’s good. It’s out there. But it’s not something you’ll create yourself. Which leaves one more choice. The universal language The Big Element here is color. It’s so simple. Yet so astonishingly under-used for productivity purposes. We learned about this trick decades ago, in which someone we respected used different-colored index cards to create a project. All the things relating to Topic A would be yellow, and all the things relating to Topic B would be blue. When this person put the deck in order, they could easily see, simply by looking at the stack of cards, how evenly divided the project was between Topics A and B. Brilliant. Picture that: A little deck of cards, sitting atop a desk. You look at the stack, and if there’s a big cluster of blue in there, you’d know the project needed adjusting. And you'd never read a word. Even though each index card was covered with words. Now fast-forward from the age of index cards, to the days of mobile devices and computers. Some of this you may be doing already. But there are opportunities to expand on this. Your calendar program—whatever it is—lets you create categories, and assign colors to them. So if, say, your “Personal” category is blue, and your “Work” category is green, you can see your work-life balance when you simply zoom out to the week, month, or year view. You'd never read a single word. And you can add categories that are similarly color-coded. We know a guy (admittedly an old-fashioned one) who sets his daughter’s category in pink, and his son’s in blue. (His wife? Purple. Stuff he hates doing? Brown.) Read without reading Here’s another. In Word (or any word processor, for that matter), you can set text in different colors. You’ve surely used red to call out important stuff. But we’ll also use colors like gray to denote work-in-progress passages that likely will get deleted later, or simply pastes of source material, to set them apart from the passages we’re actively working on. Again, like a calendar, you can zoom out—to the point where the text is too small to read. Which is what you want! Like our old friend with the deck of index cards, you can see how a Word doc is stacking up, in terms of its content balance. Mac-specific tricks Here at Copel Communications, we use Macs. So here are some tricks you can employ if you use them, too. (There are likely Windows analogs for everything we’re about to suggest here.)
These are just a few tricks. Do you have others to share? Contact us. We’d love to learn them! 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. |
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