 Great photo by Grok. We love continuous process improvement here at Copel Communications!
In this article, cash in on all the tweaking and optimizing we’ve been doing, literally for years, with different clients of ours, to make things as efficient and repeatable as possible. Today, we’re going to talk about B2B “demo” videos. Does your company ever make these? We’re talking about those “watch this screen and see what happens” kinds of explainers which also, of course, sell. So it could be a product demo. A software demo. A service. A SaaS platform. A training session. There are tons of these. They are common. And chances are, if you need to make one of these, you probably need to make a ton of these. And this is where optimized efficiency—that “Big Mac-ifying” of the process—really comes into play. In this article, we’ll describe (in broad strokes, with the details purposely blurred) how we do this for a couple of clients of ours. Pay attention: We guarantee that there are elements of this process, perhaps many elements, that apply to your situation. And the more that apply, the more you can benefit. The challenge at hand As we’d stated above, we’re going to anonymize these specific client assignments. But you’ll get enough detail to follow the process, and recognize opportunities to improve your own workflows. In the first example, this client of ours will do a screen-sharing demo of the prototype of a use-case solution they create for their clients. And they do lots of these. The big opportunity here: If you could anonymize these brilliant solutions, and pare them down into, say, little two-minute stories, you’d have marketing gold. You could use them to quickly populate, say, a dedicated playlist on your YouTube channel. You could use that to show to prospective clients, who stand to be awed, once you hit the critical mass of sheer videos posted to that playlist. Not to mention your ability to feed the voracious appetite of the SEO algorithms and web crawlers of YouTube, Google, and so on. It’s one big virtuous snowball. Turning those client demos into marketing videos, incidentally, was not as obvious a choice as you might think. You’re starting with a lot of sensitive material. You need to see the bigger marketing picture, strategically… and be able to literally blur the lines of sensitive information, tactically, once it comes time to execute. So. This client does more than have one of their reps conduct (and record, via Zoom) the client demo of each new prototype. The prototype itself is based on a use-case that was presented/sold to their client beforehand, in order to get the green-light to make the prototype. Follow? Between the raw footage of the demo Zoom call and that original use-case PDF, we’d almost have everything we need to script the video. But not quite. So here, after lots of back-and-forth and tweaking with the client, the third of our three pieces of input evolved. In this case, it’s a super basic Excel sheet. In one column, it lists the timecode of the demo video; in the column beside that, there’s a quick description of what is happening on screen at that time. Example: “00:32 – 00:41 User logs into platform, using two-factor authentication with an emailed six-digit code.” Someone on the client side makes that little Excel, typically only about ten rows deep, for us. It takes them about 30 minutes. And that’s all we need! From there, knowing this client well, we can pen the video script using a basic three-act structure:
Even easier As you can clearly see, the big lift, for the client, in the scenario above, is to create that little Excel sheet for us. But more recently, we’ve started making videos, for a different client, with no Excel required. That’s because, for the cool things that this client is creating (we can’t share details, sorry), they already create three PDFs which are not only goldmines for us, but they’re also all we require to start scripting. The three PDFs, broadly speaking, are:
These PDFs are so detailed that we’ve been able to write video scripts from them, using their details as the visuals, with the simple addition of a basic voice-over. So there will be shots such as “Zoom in ultra-tight on the detailed box at the lower right of Page 3, and pan across the different functions listed in its flow chart.” In other words, no “lift” from the client at all! It reminds us of Craisins. Huh? You know Craisins. Those “dried cranberries” originally created by Ocean Spray. While making cranberry juice, they would throw out all of the skins of the actual cranberries used. Until someone got the great idea of drying the skins and adding sugar to them, and coming up with a clever portmanteau name like “Craisin,” which implies “cranberry + raisin.” (Read our article about portmanteau names and how you can profit from them.) Think about that: All those cranberry skins were not being used. Today, they’re a massive source of newfound revenue. Ditto for the three abovementioned PDFs. They were used to create a client deliverable, and then effectively shelved. Today, they’re the basis of a “found money” marketing effort. With very little effort! Need help “McDonald-izing” some of your existing deliverables and processes into efficient marketing gold? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
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 Priceless photo by Grok. There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again.
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. To webinar or not to webinar This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. Those are huge assumptions. A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. Phew. If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. Building unbearable suspense Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: Clickbait! Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it. Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Podcasting has exploded. It’s been around so long now that many people don’t even realize that the word “podcast” has its roots in the word “iPod.” Which doesn’t even exist anymore.
But you’re not interested in etymology. You want to build your business and make more money. Sure, you could create and host your own podcast—quite the lift—or you could essentially ride the coat-tails of someone else who already has a big following, and grab a little bit of that love for yourself. If only it were that easy. What are the odds? The sad reality of today’s podcast landscape (“podscape”?) is that the numbers are driven by popularity. Media exposure, once it gets going, can snowball. But it’s hard to get it going. We hate to employ this analogy, but it’s useful nonetheless: If you’re some business wonk, how many people will follow you? How many companies will be lining up for paid sponsorships? Now replace the words “business wonk” with “Kardashian.” Ouch. As we’d said, sad reality. This is not to say that business-related podcasts can’t have influence or big audiences; they can. But before you aim to be a guest on Acquired, for example, set your sights more realistically. You, too, can build momentum and rise up the pecking order. Who are you? (And who cares?) An easy way to approach the I-want-to-be-a-podcast-guest-to-promote-my-business challenge is to look at it through the eyes of the podcast host. Why would they want you? Why would you help them? If you can definitively answer that question, you’re in good shape. Some considerations:
The more of the above boxes you can check, the better. Money can’t buy happiness It wasn’t long ago that we would advise clients to reach out to attractive podcasts on their own—usually in the form of a note from, say, an underling who would say “Hey! I think my boss would be a great guest for your podcast! Here’s why!” And then that underling would rattle off as many of the bullet points we’d listed above, as possible. Dirty little secret: No underlings were harmed in the making of that email. They were actually ghost-penned by—you guessed it—Copel Communications. Looking back, those days were quaint. As we’d said at the outset, podcasting has exploded. There are well over four million podcasts out there today. Not episodes. But actual podcasts. And the good ones—the ones you want to be on—are overwhelmed by entreaties from wanna-be guests, 24/7. So what do you do? There are actually agencies out there, today, which specialize in booking you as a guest on podcasts. No kidding: Google them and you’ll find them. And you’ll quickly see a pattern, too: They’ll often offer tiers of service, for, say, booking you on two podcasts per month. Or four, for a higher fee. But here’s the catch: You can’t simply hire one of these agencies. Throw money at them—it won’t work. Because they need to vet you first. It’s like any talent agent. They can only take your money if they can sell you in the first place. Which brings us back, once again, to all of those bullet points we’d listed above. What do you think those podcast-guest-booking agencies’ applications look like? Yup. Just like our bullet points. We can’t guarantee that we can get you “signed” by a booking firm. But we can help you burnish your credentials and make an honest assessment of your odds. Contact us and let’s talk.  Great photo by Grok. This is a perennial—and paradoxical—challenge. If you don’t update your brand after too long a period of time, it will look and feel stale.
Yet when you update it, you risk diluting it and squandering all of the brand impressions you’ve worked so hard to build. So what do you do? Is there a happy medium, a bright shining line to follow? In this article, we’ll give you some pointers, some do’s and don’ts, and a little experience of ours based on a recent client assignment. Let’s start with that last part, first. Re-Branding 101 For this client assignment (and remember, we’re always fuzzing the details to add anonymity), our client wanted to create a new “2.0” version of one of their signature branded products, which had been well established, and received, in the marketplace over the past five years. So why the update? Good question. You don’t just do these things for light or transient reasons. In the case of our client, they had made significant revisions to the product itself, to the point where it warranted a new release and brand update. So the rationale was there. That’s good. (If it’s not, push back. Simply updating for the sake of updating is a mark of, well, fashion, and that’s a whole different planet from what we’re discussing here.) A good question to ask at this time: Has the audience changed? The brand, really, is for them to consume. In our client’s case, the answer was, “Not too much.” Which let us turn, rather organically, to the mandatories which would remain. In this situation, we were locked in to the client’s color palette. They had a certain bold approach that served them well and reflected their brand identity. And they had a few little visual elements that needed to carry over, in the whole branding picture. All in all, this is a very good, solid re-branding assignment. So what did we do? Well, we listed out what needed to stay (the aforementioned mandatories) and what should get updated. We got the client’s blessing on this two-column list. Then we made some quick thumbnails—nothing too detailed, mind you—of how this new branding might be visualized. We then turned these over to the talented graphic artist we were working with on this account, and let her do her thing. Narrowing the field Our designer wowed us with lots of great options. As we had hoped, she took the ideas from the thumbnails, and then really ran with them. In lots of creative directions. They were just enough to get her going in the proper direction, while letting her creativity shine. We’re happy to report that our client had a hard time choosing. The classic “embarrassment of riches” situation. That’s as good as you can hope for. Eventually, our client chose their favorite. This then went through several rounds of tweaking revisions. And the end result was strong. The client was happy. And so were we. There was a story, a number of years ago, about the then-latest Pepsi re-brand. It was, in short, a disaster. The design firm issued something like a 40-page white paper explaining why the new logo was supposedly so great. (Not to mention expensive!) Fast-forward to today, and that re-brand is history. The newer logo is better. It respects its heritage. And it’s instantly grasp-able. Those are the do’s. The don’ts? Man, if you need to write a white paper to try and justify your brilliance to your client, start over. Need help with a re-branding initiative? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  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!  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. |