 Great photo by Grok. You may know—if you don’t, here it comes—that we’ve been writing these blogs, twice a month, for more than ten years, here at Copel Communications.
How do we always have something new to talk about? More important for you and your business: How can you always have something new to talk about? And when we say “talk about,” we’re, well, talking about things like blog entries. Videos. Social posts. Stuff that keeps you out there, in the eyes of your target audience, as a thought leader. Interesting note: This becomes all the more challenging in the age of generative AI. How can you possibly stand out amid the overwhelming tsunami of auto-generated material? Fast forward We recently gave a presentation on this exact topic. We won’t dive into the details here, but AI—tools like ChatGPT—are amazing at effectively ingesting and then memorizing (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) the entire internet. Just as easily, they can spit out (first half of previous metaphor) content at will, using said input. But they have one massive limitation that you don’t. It’s why their “intelligence” is artificial, and yours is quite real. We’ll circle back to their weakness—and your strength—in just a second. But first, let’s just talk about the mundane challenge of populating your marketing editorial calendar. You do have a marketing editorial calendar, don’t you? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Lots of companies lack them. But it’s never too late to start. Think of it this way: Why break into a flop sweat every time you need to push out new material on a pre-determined cadence? If that’s an hour of stress, say, twice a month, why not eliminate it? The solution is easy: Dedicate one big chunk of time, typically around year-end, to simply jot down a list of every month of the year, and then brainstorm the topic you’ll develop content for, for each month. It’s hard, but it’s a one-shot effort, and you’ll end up with a year’s worth of topics. Yes, it’s hard. But there’s a neat trick to it, as the headline of this article has not-so-subtly implied. Back to that ChatGPT weakness. Hindsight is overrated ChatGPT seems brilliant because it can memorize the entire internet. That’s some feat. But here’s a feat you accomplish every day, which it can’t do: You look forward. The internet is a repository of stuff from the past. If you can spot trends among your clients, guess what? You’re already smarter than ChatGPT. This dovetails with our populate-the-calendar challenge rather nicely. While you may be doing this at year-end (or right now, no one cares), you’ll be using information that ChatGPT has zero access to: Your thoughts, and your files. So here—finally!—is the trick we’d teased at the outset: Looking for topics for marketing material for your business? Look no further than your recent invoices. Yep. You read right. Your invoices are magic fodder for this assignment. Look at any given one. It shows how you earned your keep, and how you delivered unique value, for any given client. And therein lies a story. Think back on what you’d billed for. There was, invariably, a challenge to solve. And you solved it. (And your client was happy to pay you for that expertise.) That’s a story. It’s a cool story. It’s a story that showcases your uniqueness and thought leadership. It’s also a story that ChatGPT couldn’t write in a million years. Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach. We build our editorial blog-post calendar, and stick to it. And we routinely open up our own billing files for cool stories that we can anonymize and share with you for handy tips and lessons learned. Need help with that next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
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 Great photo by Alena Darmel. Here at Copel Communications, we get tasked with lots of different writing assignments. There are video scripts. Blogs. Case studies. Email campaigns. Sales decks. Landing pages. Social posts. You name it.
Thing is, a lot of these overlap. And therein lies an opportunity—for you—to approach your marketing outreach more effectively and cost-efficiently. Learn from our experience and evolved best practice. It’s actually pretty simple, but it requires both foresight and discipline. Signed, sealed deliverables Our clients will typically want to promote something (a product, a service, an announcement) to as many people/prospects as possible. Which requires leveraging various media, such as web pages, YouTube, email, and so on. And here’s where the “package” concept originated. We realized, early on, that all of these deliverables-centered-around-the-same-story were basically all parts of the same, bigger thing. Thus we coined the phrase “content package”; you might not see it described that way elsewhere. The idea of “packaging” these, however, is powerful. First of all, it’s hugely efficient. If you’re going to create one of these things, create all of them… at the same time. Note that we said “create.” Not, say, “post” or “publish.” That might be staggered, depending on your media plan. But you do want to create them all at once. It’s going to be easier and more efficient for your writing resource, since they’ll need to align their proverbial ducks just once. That will translate to more consistent content across the package’s discrete elements—and lower costs, too. Here’s another advantage of packaging these assignments together: It’s effectively a marketing checklist. By green-lighting a package, you eliminate the possibility of later discovering that you’d inadvertently left one element out. What’s the core asset? The components of any content package will be dissimilar, not in terms of facts or messaging, but rather in terms of sheer size. The package might include, say, an 800-word blog, along with a 280-character tweet (or X-chirp, or whatever it’s called nowadays). The point is, if you’re going to create all this stuff, know that it’s always easier to cut than to add. That matters, whether you’re creating the materials yourself or assigning them to someone else. In other words, you don’t start with the tweet. Identify the biggest, most detailed, and labor-intensive element in the package, and create that one first. Once it’s nicely honed, you can use it as a feeder for all of the others. It’s not quite as simple as doing a “Save as…” and then chopping down, because there are other constraints and style and audience factors to take into consideration. But still, all the heavy lifting should be done for the “core” asset. Example: We have a client who publishes case studies in a tightly-defined three-tab format (“Client,” “Team,” “Solution”). But they’ll also push out a more narrative-style blog about the same story—and the blog always has more detail, captioned illustrations, and little behind-the-scenes anecdotes baked into it. So we always do the blog first. Then the case study. Then the three-touch email campaign. Then the social teasers for the blog and the case study… you get the idea. Packaged goods As we’d mentioned earlier, creating content packages requires foresight and discipline. Foresight, in that you must often delay gratification, knowing that one element of the package may well roll out at some time in the future. And discipline, in that you must remember to employ the content-package approach, and stick to it. But, like any best practice, once you get used to doing this, you’ll find it becomes second nature… to the vast advantage of your marketing outreach, and your production budget. Need help “packaging” up any content, or creating the elements thereof? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Pixabay. We have a client that does a lot of blogging—like a lot of our clients.
And, like a lot of our clients, they hire us to write—make that ghost-write—a lot of those blogs. Also, like a lot of our clients, they also use an SEO firm to create other, SEO-focused blogs for them. A two-pronged approach. So far, so good. But what are “production blogs”? And why does this client hate them so much? Production blogs vs. thought-leadership blogs First off, you can’t really Google “production blogs.” It’s a term we made up. Production blogs can be defined as blogs that are written for a business, using pre-existing web-based materials for their background research, and used primarily to drive up SEO (search-engine optimization) numbers, i.e., search results on Google. You, as a consumer, likely encounter these blogs all the time. That’s your clue that they work: You searched for some information on Google, and up popped one of these articles in the list of hits. Again, so far, so good. But then—and consider how common and familiar this is—once you click on the article, you’re quickly disappointed. It sure contains your exact question or query, probably about a dozen times, in different phrasing, but doesn’t give you much hard information that you’d craved. It feels very regurgitated. It reads like a mashup of other online articles, 1) carefully reworded to avoid copyright/plagiarism conflicts, and 2) like it was written by someone who’s, well, not the greatest writer. Trust your Spidey Sense on this one. You’re exactly right on all counts. Whatever site that blog resided on, just boosted its SEO numbers when you clicked to it. Did you feel satisfied? Did you get the info you needed? Naah. Not really. Importantly—sometimes hugely importantly—you didn’t get one whiff of a professional, well-informed opinion. Which segues, nicely, to the other kind of blogs: Thought-leadership blogs Just like “production blogs,” this is a term that we here at Copel Communications invented. But the name—“thought-leadership blogs”—gives away what they are. In stark contrast to production blogs, these are not written by scouring a lot of pre-existing material online. To the contrary, they’re written by interviewing a really well-informed SME or subject-matter expert. We enjoy writing these. We enjoy doing the interviews. In the best ones, our subjects get pretty adamant, even riled. That’s what we want. We want them to rely on their professional opinion, expertise, and years of experience to dismantle incorrect and ill-informed preconceived notions, and set the record straight. It's arguably an uphill battle: The search-structured web is effectively an echo chamber, where bad information gets reused and elevated to the status of “trusted source,” when it’s actually anything but. So our same SME client, who rages against the search machine, is justifiably mad at the production blogs they’re forced to proofread prior to publication. Why? Lots of reasons. For one, they’re rife with factual errors. While they assiduously don’t break any copyright laws, they do proliferate bad information that’s breeding online. This client of ours also operates in a highly-regulated industry, so the information found by the writer simply might not apply, because what’s legal and permissible in one U.S. state, isn’t in our client’s state. Also, production blogs are generally just hard to read. They have all the appeal of a Wikipedia entry. No hook, no drama, no story, no voice, no personality, no iconoclasm, no payoff. We know. We’re also tasked with proofing these things, and they take us forever. And we’re paid to read them! Two for one Knowing all this, why does our client still do both? For a very good reason. This is a basic tenet of marketing known as the media mix. You can’t achieve everything with either one of these blogs; using both is prudent and smart. The production blogs are better at finding people who are simply Googling at the top of the sales funnel. The thought-leadership blogs are better at converting visitors into believers—and thus prospects—deeper down in the funnel. It’s like mixing paid and earned media: a basic, smart mix. Our client recently asked us, somewhat rhetorically, “How come we can proofread your blogs in about two minutes, with almost no changes, while these other blogs take us hours and tons of aggravating work?” The answer is simple. As we’d noted above, we base our thought-leadership blogs off the SME interviews we conduct, where we take detailed, careful notes. So the SME’s knowledge is reflected in the final product. Credit where it’s due. If you need production blogs, there are plenty of good sources out there. If you need thought-leadership blogs, the field rapidly narrows. Contact us and let us help you advance your business’ mission—and passion—to the world.  Great photo by icon0.com We recently worked with a consultant who targeted certain professional-services firms, with the aim of improving their cashflow. While we were working on the website copy for this client, the conversation took an interesting turn:
Who was this website to target? Sure, it’s the “professional-services firms.” But who within them? Aha. Big question. Defining, and ranking, the “person target” within your intended audience is one of the most important, yet overlooked, exercises you can undertake in your business. So let’s talk about that. Concentric circles For the client we’d mentioned above, the initial target was the owners of these professional-services firms. But since the offering was all about improving cashflow, the better target was those people within those proserv firms handling the billing. While both audiences would appreciate the offering—and even though the practice owners would be the ones to approve the purchase, and sign the checks—it was determined that the billing people were the ones who were more desperate, who needed this yesterday, and who would beg, plead, coerce, and threaten their bosses to spring for this offering until they actually did... compared to the owners, who might regard this more as a nice-to-have. Hmm. Mind you, this is a subtle distinction. It required a good degree of customer intimacy for our client to see, and then act upon, the difference. But it certainly affected our job, and our messaging. It’s a totally different offer, addressing a totally different set of pain points, if you’re selling to the billing person vs. the practice owner. Not that we intended to alienate the latter. “Speak to the target, but let others listen,” is the old Leo Burnett quote. But remember—always remember—that you’ve only got so much space. And so much time. That prospect is in instant-gratification mode when they’re up in the sales funnel, still trying to quickly learn about your business and the realm in which it competes. So you’ve got to nail that message, and place it above-the-fold where it’s most prominent. But what if (of course you’re thinking of this already) Target Audience A and Target Audience B are basically equal in value? And what do you do if the messaging to each isn’t subtly different, but rather significantly different? Divide and conquer We actually wrote an entire blog on this subject, and we’ll recommend it here. The gist is that you can basically create a bifurcated website, which presents the visitor with two different “doors” to enter once they arrive. So they self-select, and enter through the “door” that’s right for them. It works. But you should only use that approach when it’s appropriate. (Don’t worry: that blog includes examples.) For most other situations, you’ll want to “target the target,” and be as laser-focused as you can. This leads to another common question of target-audience ranking (or, as some of our consulting clients would phrase it, “value-delivery-based market segmentation”). In the world of consultancies, there are, broadly, two types of audiences: the do-it-myself’s and the do-it-for-me’s. Those monikers are pretty obvious, but let’s make it extra clear: The do-it-myself’s (or DIYs) are often looking for the control and satisfaction of doing something on their own (albeit with professional help and/or tools), and almost always are looking to save money in the process. The do-it-for-me’s, by contrast, value time and lack of aggravation so much that they’re willing to spend—a premium, no less—in order to get it. Your business may well serve both. So you need to determine which camp you prefer to serve (i.e., which is more lucrative and smoother), and reflect that weighting in your marketing and messaging, accordingly. Questions—and distinctions—like these sometimes seem so subtle as to not be worth mentioning, let alone dedicating time and effort toward. But nothing could be further from the truth. The better you define, and target, your audience, the more they’ll thank you for addressing their unique challenges... and reward you with business in the process. Need help with target-audience segmentation? Contact us. We work on projects like these all the time.  “Product-izing” isn’t a new concept. But it has regained popularity and momentum recently, for good reason. It can be a nice business-builder if you toil in the professional-services space.
But what is it? And what’s this “it can” caveat? Don’t worry. We’ll dive into all the details for you in this article, replete with do’s, don’ts, and some recent client examples. Why are services so hard to sell? A good chunk of our clientele here at Copel Communications consists of consultancies and similar professional-services firms. A lot of them are in high tech, or are at least high-tech-enabled. They’re all selling services. So are you. That’s why you’re reading this. You, like them, want to grow more business. Here’s the thing: Product-izing any of your offerings doesn’t really change what you do. It’s not disrupting your business model. It’s mostly a marketing ploy. You’ll still be selling the services you want to sell; you simply want to increase your odds of selling more of them. So. As you likely guessed by now, “product-izing” a service of yours just means dressing it up to look like a product, in the eyes of the target audience. Which begs a couple questions:
Let’s answer the second question first. Services, by their nature, are conceptual. You’re going to be doing something for your client, to help them get from A to B. Which means they need help along that journey. You’re good at finding, and eliminating, the various sticking points; that’s your expertise. But wrapping your head around all of this, as a prospect, when you’re simply Googling or seeing an online banner ad or checking out a web page, is hard. Services are hard. Products, on the other hand, are simple. So if you can pitch your service as a product—and here’s the key: as an instantly familiar product—you can attract that prospect, and convert the sale, that much quicker and easier. Think of it this way. What if you cut your finger? What would you need? You’d need, after washing the wound, to somehow figure out a way to keep it closed and protected against the elements so it could heal safely and cleanly, in a way that’s convenient, cost-effective, and requires minimal training and maintenance. What a mouthful. What if we just said, “Band-Aid”? Aha. A product. Which actually performs all these service-like things. You get it instantly. So this answers the “Why.” It’s also a great segue into the “How.” To serve or not to serve First off, some guidelines. You can’t, you shouldn’t, product-ize all of your service offerings. You need to be selective. This is easy. You want to productize relatively inexpensive, self-contained, entry-level service offerings. You want to look through your offerings for easy “bundles” that lend themselves to, um, “productization.” “Isn’t this,” you might ask, “the same thing as a ‘bundled service’?” Yup. Pretty much. You’re just paying more attention to the packaging and perception. And remember “entry-level.” You’re not doing this whole exercise to sell products to your existing clients. This is a foot-in-the-door offering to new prospects. So let’s say you’ve scoped out a common set of services that could qualify as a “product.” Now it’s time to do a little work. Product development Remember our “it can” caveat upfront? Here’s where we get into it. To work successfully, product-izing takes creativity and effort:
The name game This is one that, surprisingly, surprises our clients (albeit pleasantly) when we mention it to them. Often, they’re so wrapped up in the creation of the “product” that they forget that the whole purpose of this is to make an existing service more “sell-able.” What if, for example, you had some kind of digital service offering that quickly protected against bad actors with minimal cost and effort? Sure, you could call it “The Advanced Automated Firewall Remediation Protection Package.” But what if you called it an “IT Band-Aid”? That’s not the greatest example, because 1) a Band-Aid has a less-than-stellar connotation as a makeshift fix (“That’s just a Band-Aid!”), 2) “IT Band-Aid” doesn’t sound like a product, and 3) "Band-Aid" is someone else's protected trademark. But you still get the idea. Working with our clients, we’ve come up with some cool names for some cool product-ized offerings which, for confidentiality’s sake, we can’t reveal here. But they’re similar to “Band-Aid” in their underpinnings, in that they leverage the immediate perception of something else that’s popular and instantly understood to be valuable, and adapt it for that client’s specific situation and product-ized offering. Again, we can’t get into specifics, but consider this broad-strokes analogy: For one of our clients, we helped them develop a product-ized offering that was, let’s say, similar to Coca-Cola. This offering turned out to be a huge hit. So did we rest on our laurels? Heck no! We saw the potential for “brand expansion.” Seeing how that “Coca-Cola” worked so well, we helped the client come up with… “Diet Coke.” It was its own new product, and had its own campaigns. But it was similar enough to the first one (“Original Recipe,” LOL!) that the advertising impressions made the first time around also helped to “soften the beachhead” for the spin-off product. Diet Coke led to Cherry Coke. And then to Vanilla Coke. You get it. We weren’t exactly inventing the wheel here, but we sure were greasing the bearings. Get help You’ll see lots of articles, online, about the advantages of product-izing your service offerings. But it’s easier said than done. So get some help with the doing. Contact us. We tackle assignments like this every day, and would love to help you, too.  How to remain apolitical while working as a hired gun
It’s that time of year again. Granted, this is a smaller election cycle than, say, the four-year presidential one, but it’s still time when lots of races start to gear up. What’s this have to do with a posting about “creative services” from Copel Communications? Glad you asked. As a creative, you might find yourself tasked, from time to time, to work on something political. It may be something pretty tame. Or it may be highly provocative. It might align with your own beliefs. Or it may fly in their face. So what do you do? Setting the ground rules First off, you need to have your own boundaries. You need a bright shining line which you refuse to cross, professionally. And you need to get the fastest possible understanding of the potential project in order to make that go/no-go decision, ASAP. You don’t want to waste that client’s time, hemming and hawing. And you don’t want to waste your own time, either. Sometimes (albeit rarely), this will be easy. You might be handed an assignment that’s so polarizing, or so, well, offensive that not only does it run counter to your own ethos, but even if you were to try and take it on, you’d do lousy work. You couldn’t possibly approach it dispassionately. Notice we said “rarely”? Because, as a rule, these will be tougher calls. We worked on a project recently for an agency that represented a big business concern. Oooh: “big business.” The Evil Empire, right? We’re not against big business, but we needed to bring in another resource who might’ve been. They were cagey about joining the project. But guess what? The aim of this big business group, in part, was to help low-income people. (From a political standpoint, this was a matter of lobbying for direct vs. indirect assistance for these people. In other words, do you help them with lower prices [what the business wanted], or a government subsidy funded by taxes [what the opponents wanted]? Either side could claim the high ground; both were, ostensibly, “looking out for the little guy.”) Seen in this (hugely parenthetical!) light, our partners were happy to come on board. Incidentally, this was a “high-ground” campaign we were working on. That is, “Look at all the benefits! Wouldn’t this be great?” It wasn’t a smear campaign of the opposition. We’d likely have passed on that one. Hitting it out of the park Not long ago, we were handed an interesting creative assignment for one of the country’s leading new-economy companies, courtesy of their agency. (Can you see how we’re bending over backward to anonymize this??) They wanted a certain legislative initiative passed, and were actually targeting the policymakers themselves. This might sound like a “lobbying” campaign, but this client has such deep pockets that they were going all-out in all media: television, radio, outdoor, social, transit, you name it. We can see the logic of the media spend: If the creative were done right, it would also induce a good warm-and-fuzzy feeling among the very constituents who voted for those policymakers. Get it? We’ve said this a zillion times in these articles, and we’ll say it again: Know Thy Customer. In this case, the “customer” was the policymaker. We needed to know what was on their plate. What kept them up at night. What their biggest concerns were. Only then did we consider what the big business was proposing; otherwise, our appeals would have been tone-deaf. We developed a number of overall multimedia creative concepts, which really took an emotional approach to the seemingly sterile legislation. It was all about how it impacted underserved people (detect a common thread here among these political players?) who would benefit, if the policymakers went the way the business preferred. Our reasoning was akin to “Why did you want to get into politics in the first place?” Or, to use a phrase that politicians prefer to use, “Why did you want to get into public service in the first place?” See the difference? A parting shot Politics, and political campaigns, are potential landmines for any business. The above examples are about actual election-cycle campaigns. Here at Copel Communications, we’re officially apolitical. You have no idea where we stand, left or right, red or blue. That’s intentional. We advise the same for all our non-election-cycle clients, too. Put it this way: The instant you get political in any of your messaging, you effectively alienate half of your audience! Some companies, such as Nike (and, to a lesser extent, Apple), are willing, indeed proud, to stick their necks out thus. But they’re the exceptions. For everyone else, it’s good politics to remain apolitical. Need help with that next campaign, whatever it may be? Contact us. We’d be delighted to put our experience to work for you.  Boy is this ever a fun—if uncommon—topic. So many times, in these articles, we’ve addressed ways to deliver the most bang for the buck... and often, for the nickel.
That’s not always the case. Every once in a while, we’ll work on an assignment for a client with incredibly deep pockets. Then the calculus changes. Not the creative. But the approach to the creative. Think of it this way. If you see some low-budget movie with no-name actors in it, everything is cheap. The sets. The music. Even the hair and makeup look bad. Now make that same movie, except with an A-lister. Would the music sound tinny? No way. Would the sets look cheap? Nope. Would one hair on that actor’s head be out of place, in even one shot? Never. But these two hypothetical movies are shot from the exact same script. Or are they? Playing Monopoly More times than we can count, we’ve used the word “stock” in deliverables we create: References to stock photos. Stock music. Stock illustrations. Canned material. Granted, that does pose some very real creative problems. How do you, for example, make your stuff stand out when you’re using the same ingredients as countless others? (We wrote a cool article on that very topic; check it out here.) But for a recent assignment, the sky was the limit. Of course we’re under NDA so we’ll need to cloak the details in anonymity, but the client was a major U.S. enterprise. You know their name, even if you haven’t used their service. And you likely have used their service. So. We were tasked (by this enterprise’s ad agency, to be clear) with developing concepts for a creative campaign that would span all media. Think network television spots. Bus sides in major cities. Blanketed social media. Everything. In the broad scheme of things—and this is pretty typical in situations like this—the client’s big budget item wasn’t the creative, but the media buy. (Yes, our rates are quite reasonable here at Copel Communications!) Think of, for example, a Super Bowl spot. There’s no way the production budget comes anywhere near the price-tag for the air time. But we still had what felt like Monopoly money to play with. Imagine an unlimited production budget. What do you do? How do you spend it? It’s all in the scale We’ll single out one of the campaign concepts we’d submitted here, because it illustrates our point nicely. We wanted to show (imagine that this is a “pride” campaign, showing the world how great this company is) that this company makes people’s lives better. So we’d start with, say, a guy on the street. A woman in a grocery store. A cop on the beat. (Remember, we’re fudging reality here a tad, to maintain confidentiality.) And we could then show how each of these people’s lives were improved by Big Company. That’s fine. In fact, it’s nice. It’s intimate. You, the viewer, can easily connect and identify with all these people. But what if it’s bigger than that? What if Big Company is helping entire neighborhoods? How do you show that? Know how? You show it. You go big. You go aerial. You broaden the perspective—try that with stock footage—and have all these people coming together harmoniously. But it gets even bigger. (Yes, Big Company has global ambitions.) Big Company, it turns out, is helping the entire planet. It’s all part of the “E” in what’s commonly known as ESG, for Environmental, Social, and Governance, i.e., corporate social responsibility. So we scripted time-lapse special effects which depict the world’s wounds, healing. Changes in the oceans. The weather. All orchestrated (what the heck, call in the orchestra) to this very human-level narrative which began, mere seconds ago, at the street-and-grocery-store level. That’s how you use a big budget. Stress-test it Note the progression here. We started small on purpose. The reason for this was twofold: 1) It established the intimate, human connection. 2) It effectively “showed off” the big budget: The spot grows bigger and bigger and more audacious as it goes. That’s intentional. Imagine if we didn’t work that way. What if the spot started with the planets and stars and special effects? Then it doesn’t have anywhere to go. There’s no exciting revelation, no expansion. In a strange way, it would be small. Here’s another stress test: Does the whole thing resonate with the client’s intent and vision? Put bluntly: You can’t bring in space ships and aliens if there’s no need for space ships and aliens. Everything must be justified. Overall, we’d say that lower-budget projects force you to be more, not less, creative. You have to do more with less; you can’t simply buy your way out of a problem. But big budgets, as you’ve seen, have their own special challenges. We couldn’t turn in a script for just-the-grocery-store-level perspective for this assignment; we’d be laughed out of the room. You need to make it appropriate for the assignment. And yes, even the budget. Not everything we work on is a multimillion-dollar project. Not that yours isn’t—but even if it isn’t, we’d be delighted to help. A creative challenge is a creative challenge, and we love rising to the occasion. Contact us today to get started.  Okay. We’ll admit that the title of this blog—“ SME-based articles for non-SME audiences”—is a mouthful. But it’s also a good, important topic when it comes to business development for your consultancy or professional-services firm. And it speaks to assignments we work on a lot, to our clients’ benefit.
This story starts with a story. We were tasked with writing a highly technical blog article for a high-tech client. So far, so logical. But the intended audience was non-technical. Aha. Who’s pulling the purse-strings? Let’s keep one thing clear here: Our mission, at Copel Communications, is to help our clients make more money. Period. All of the deliverables we produce, whether they’re websites or video scripts or blog articles like the one we’re describing here, are designed to soften the beachhead of prospects, and ease them further down the funnel into buyers. Taking a customer-back approach to the challenge of this article, we asked our client: “Who is this aimed at?” More specifically, “Who would be buying what we’re selling?” This is where it gets interesting. Our client makes high-tech equipment for use in a variety of scientific applications. And there are lab technicians who use this equipment. For them, a highly technical article would be appropriate, with no need for dumbing down any of the nerdy details. But these lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. Oooh. Let’s repeat that: These lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. And this is where the lessons of this story apply to what is likely a ton of scenarios for your business. Two different audiences The lab technicians’ bosses certainly have technical know-how, given their career path up the corporate ladder. But they don’t need to read an article on the nuts-and-bolts of this technical equipment. They’d rather know the business case for buying one (which often involves replacing an aging or lesser version of the exact same thing). More importantly, a big, albeit secondary, chunk of the intended audience was relative newbies in the field: People just starting their careers who, despite their schooling, need to quickly get up to speed in the real world to get ahead. For those people, they’d be Googling topics of interest to learn more. And thus this article was seeded with the types of keywords they’d be searching on; think of it as a “101”-type intro article on the broad applications of this piece of equipment. Now, why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing? Let’s make this easier by re-phrasing the above question: Why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing today? Right. Given their ambition and hunger for information, they’ll likely be purchasers of this equipment tomorrow. Time moves fast in business. And they’ll be the ones who will thank this company (our client) for giving them the free knowledge they’d craved to get up to speed in their new careers. Not only that, but said company also proved to be a reliable source of expertise, which burnishes its brand and reputation. Why wouldn’t you go with that brand of equipment when the time comes? Un-SME-ing the SME So we knew all of what we described above, about the target-audience landscape, when it came time for us to interview the subject matter expert (SME) assigned to us for the article. Not only that, we explained this situation, upfront, to the SME. So she understood what our intention was, and what we needed to do. She was very generous with her expertise, but also helped us to explain the why’s and what-for’s of each nugget of information, so it would be more than just a litany of facts; it would be a basis for working knowledge in the lab. And thus the article. In fact, we did a couple of these; they’re peppered in among the company’s more-technical offerings, which is a smart approach unto itself: Never assume your target audience is homogenous, especially when it comes to their level of experience or expertise. So the next time you feel inclined to push out technical promotional material to the world, (re)consider your audience. You certainly don’t want to swamp or intimidate the very people who might make formidable future allies—or customers. Need assistance with this kind of complex communication challenge? Contact us. We help our clients with assignments like this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too.  Some cool, counterintuitive findings
We have a client, here at Copel Communications, that tasks us with writing a lot of short marketing videos for them. They get posted on YouTube. We also do lots of other stuff for this client: blogs, ads, case studies, and so on. One day, not long ago, they asked us to write a blog about a video we’d already written. At first, this seemed to be a head-scratcher. Video is, by its nature, the densest and most elegant way of communicating; it’s common to pack, say, five minutes worth of info into a three-minute video, simply because you have the layering of images, titles, and voiceover. So why would you want to write a blog about that video? Isn’t that redundant? A smarter way of looking at things At first, we thought—we assumed—that this must be, solely, for SEO purposes. That is, helping the search-bots to find the videos. Thus, the audience must be “search bots,” and not “real humans,” right? Wrong. This client, by the way, is very smart. They’d analyzed the behavior of their site and YouTube visitors, and determined that intermingling a blog with a video would provide a synergistic effect. Were they right? The blog, in case you haven’t guessed, wasn’t very hard to write; after all, we still had the original script we’d penned to create the video in the first place. It wasn’t a copy-and-paste job, because 1) video scripting is written differently than blog copy, and 2) a real human reader would feel cheated to read the exact same thing that they’d get from the video. Indeed, it was somewhat liberating for us: These videos have a tight time-cap on them; in the blog, we were a little freer to play, and could add details and embellishments that we couldn't put into the original script. So once posted, it looked like this: There would be a headline to the blog article, followed by a paragraph or two, and then copy that would say, “We made a whole video on this topic; here it is.” Below that, there would be a big tile, imported from YouTube, for watching the video. Below that, the article would continue, broken up with interesting graphics—some of which were borrowed from the original video elements. But did it pay off? Once this posted, the client went back to their analytics. And boy did their hunch pay off. Turns out that not everyone wants to read the entire blog. They might just want to consume a paragraph or two, and then watch the video. Or they might just view a part of the video, pause it, and then skim the rest of the article and its illustrations. The point is that this hybrid approach paid off handsomely, providing a veritable smorgasbord to the client’s site visitors. Icing on the cake: It fed those search-bots, too. Hybrid power This is not the end of the story. To this day, this client tasks us with the one-two punch of video-plus-blog all the time, and the results keep on pouring in. But it goes beyond that. Think about it: A hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds, and you needn’t restrict it to just blogs and videos. We’ll do social and retargeting ads for the same campaign. We’ll do email campaigns that tie to a new landing page for a given offer or audience. The lesson here: Never assume your audience is consuming solely one medium. They’re not. And if you’re serving them only one, you’re missing out. Have a creative or marketing challenge that’s keeping you up at night? Contact us. We’d love to help.  Here at Copel Communications, we’re often asked, “What’s the best way to reach prospective clients?” More specifically, “What medium—such as LinkedIn ads, or direct mail, or whatever—should we use?”
These are great questions. This article will answer them. If things like your website, social ads, and eblasts are different media, then the way you combine them is called the “media mix.” It’s an advertising term. Don’t let it intimidate you. Every business that promotes itself in any way has a media mix. Of course, that’s not saying it’s a good one! We’ll start here with a basic assumption: You’re not Jeff Bezos. You don’t have unlimited funds. You need the biggest possible bang for your buck. How, then, do you proceed? First things first If you’ve read any of our articles, you’ll know that we’re downright passionate about taking a customer-first approach to marketing, and that applies to the media mix, too. If you start with your prospective customer, and really understand them, the elements of the media mix will actually fall right into place for you. What might at first seem daunting will quickly become straightforward. Let’s say you’re targeting logistics executives. You need to know everything you possibly can about them—the more, the better:
If you don’t have ready, and detailed, answers to each one of these questions, get them. Because you certainly can’t get into the tactical weeds of the media mix without them. But if you do have these answers, the next steps become progressively simpler. Know thy message If you know what’s keeping these people up at night, you also need to know how to flange your offering with it. We’ll assume, for the purposes of this article, that your offering brilliantly and uniquely solves these prospects’ problems. Then it’s simply (!) a matter of telling that prospect, in your messaging, how their life will be better with your company in it. So. You know their needs. You have a way to address them. You know how to communicate that solution, compellingly. Can’t you see how “the media mix” is now a really, really straightforward exercise? Carving up your options In today’s world, you have lots of choices when it comes to the media you employ. These include—and this is just a scratch-the-surface sampling, to get you thinking in the right direction—things such as:
As we said, the list goes on forever. And this is why it strikes people—people who approach it, list-first—as intimidating. There are so many choices! Which is the best one? First off, you should have caught the inherent error in that last question. It’s not “which one,” singular. It’s “which ones,” plural. You can’t have a “mix” with just one ingredient. Second, use your customer-first exercise, above, to begin your prioritizing. Are you into B2C (business-to-consumer) ecommerce? Then it’s hard to not consider Facebook. Is your business B2B (business-to-business)? Well then LinkedIn is hard to ignore. By the way, “Your website” is kind of an essential anchor to all of the above. It needs to be awesome, and quickly tell your story/motivate visitors to take action. (Far too many sites are hopelessly bloated. That’s the topic of a popular article of ours: “Your Website Is Too Big.”) Diving into details Once you know which troughs these prospects are feeding from, that’s where you go. It’s where you prioritize your efforts, and your spending. “Knowing what they’re searching for” will also inform your SEO (search-engine optimization) efforts, so that your site climbs the ranks in their search results. Some media cost more than others. It’s still expensive to buy a full-page ad in the print edition of The New York Times, even if that print edition isn’t long for this world. So make your best, educated decisions about how to allocate. A couple helpful pointers:
Get help There are businesses that are solely devoted to media buying and placement. We’re not one of them. If you’ve got the budget to use one, by all means, partake. Our sweet spot, for our direct clients, is for businesses who have the hunger and the wherewithal to do it themselves, with a combination of internal and external resources. If that’s you, let us help. We can help you answer the fundamental customer-discovery questions which underpin the media mix; we can also help you create killer materials that motivate those prospects to choose your business over others. Contact us now and let’s talk. |