​Sometimes, the success of your creative marketing hinges on some decidedly un-creative input. 
 
Here’s a true story. 
 
We were recently tasked with scripting a video for a client of ours. Granted, we have to cloak this in anonymity, but you’ll get the gist: 
 
The client of ours is a consultancy. They had created a breakthrough technical solution for one of their clients. Our job was to script a video, showing the whole world this breakthrough solution—while also anonymizing our client’s client. 
 
Follow? 
 
On the surface, this is a pretty straightforward assignment. We had to write a script which would show prospective clients (for the consultancy) how amazing this technical solution is. But it quickly became trickier than you might think. 
 
Our point of contact at the consultancy was one of the super-sharp technical people who had actually worked on this breakthrough solution. Let’s call him Steve. 
 
Steve was our source of input. And so Steve—not terribly shockingly—told us all about this breakthrough solution. Every nut and bolt. Every feature. Every output. Every paradigm-shattering spec. 
 
And we couldn’t write the script.
 
Know why? 
 
Think about it. 
 
Our task was to write a brief—as in, two- to three-minute—video, dramatically showcasing this breakthrough solution. 
 
Yet what had Steve, in all his ardent energy, failed to provide us? 
 
Of course: Act One.
 
Huh? 
 
Two sides to every story (and marketing piece)
 
A video like this—or any marketing piece like this—should follow what we call “a two-act structure.” Steve had given us all of the input for Act Two. That is, the solution.
 
But of course! Now it’s super obvious, isn’t it? 
 
A solution solves a problem.
 
What was the problem?? 
 
We asked Steve. And he said “Well, our client couldn’t do X.” And yes, he technically answered our question, but he didn’t exactly help us. 
 
And here we get to the gist of this article. Steve is not a creative pro. That’s not his job. He excels at plenty of other stuff, and the world is a better place because of it. 
 
But he needed a little help, a little nudging, from us, to give us the input we’d craved for Act One of this script. 
 
And so we asked him, “Could you tell us more, please? Why couldn’t your client do X? What were all the contributing factors? We want to know, as much as possible, about the sheer chaos they were confronting before your solution came along. We want the ‘Before’ to be horrendous! Inundate us with details! The messier, the better!” 
 
You could see the light dawning in Steve’s eyes. Of course! The messier, the better! Because The Great Wonderful Solution isn’t so great or wonderful unless it really clears what appear to be insurmountable hurdles. 
 
Once Steve got it, he got it. After all, who would know that client’s “before” situation better than him? He piled on with gory details, and voilà! We were able to pen a truly effective video. 
 
Clearly, you can extrapolate a lot from this little story. Marketing and advertising routinely require creativity. And just as routinely, your input sources may not be people who are naturally creative. 
 
But they can be coaxed. The information is there. You just need to tease it out. 
 
Need help with a creative challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

​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! 

​“Blend word”?? What the heck is that? 
 
More importantly, how can you make money off of one of these things?
 
Let’s dive in. 
 
As is the case with lots of our articles here at Copel Communications, this one is based on a real client story. And as is the case with all of the real client stories we use as inspiration for articles, this one, like the others, has been anonymized for privacy purposes. But you’ll still get the gist. And the takeaways. 
 
Here’s the story: 
 
Recently, a client of ours wanted us to develop some pitch materials for a new business they were developing. Excitedly, they told that they’d already come up with a name for this new business, and were looking forward to registering a domain for it. 
 
The name of this new business (we’re modifying/anonymizing/making this up) was “Asset Protect.” 
 
“Asset Protect.” Hmmm. 
 
Well, you can guess, pretty accurately, what they do. So that’s good. 
 
But boy is that name ever generic. Which is not good. 
 
Can you guess where this story goes? Of course: Our client had one tough time registering that “unique” domain. “Asset Protect” had long been taken, by someone else, in an equally straightforward/uncreative foray. 
 
Portmanteau to the rescue
 
To us, the solution to this problem was super simple. Employ a portmanteau or blend word. 
 
“Portmanteau” is about as funny a term as “blend word,” and you may not have heard of either. 
 
Not a problem. Because you know zillions of examples of these things, and you’ll say “Ohhh!” as soon as you read ones like: 

• Breakfast + lunch = brunch 

 

• Smoke + fog = smog

 

• iPod + broadcast = podcast 

 

• Web + log = blog 

 
We could go on forever. 
 
Applying this mashup concept to branding is equally well established and, we think, effective. Consider: 

• FedEx

 

• PetSmart 

 

• Microsoft 

 

• PayPal 

 

• Pinterest

 

• YouTube

 

• Snapchat 

 

• Facebook 

 

• DoorDash 

 
Need we go on? 
 
One of the reasons we mention this is because our frustrated client had considered inventing a totally new made-up name. That certainly comes with benefits: For example, if you invent something completely new, there won’t be any competition for it when it comes to registering your domain, and you’ll have rock-solid IP protection in the potential case of infringement. 
 
Still. The drawback is that that’s hard to do, for a basic small-to-midsized business. It takes a ton of (expensive) impressions for the whole world to know what you do. 
 
Consider: 

• Apple 

 

• Amazon 

 

• Zillow 

 
Honestly. Would you have any idea what those companies do without their having invested zillions of dollars to inform you? 
 
So. The portmanteau/blend-word is a nice middle ground between the uninspired “Asset Protect” and the what-the-heck-is-that “Wazzibobo” or whatever. 
 
It’s not perfect. Because great minds think alike. If you’re launching a new brand and come up with what you think is the perfect portmanteau word for it, brace yourself. There’s a decent chance that someone else already came up with that one, and registered it, too. 
 
Not to worry. Keep on plugging. 
 
Or get help. Like us. Contact us for that next marketing assignment. We do things like this all the time, and would be delighted to help. 

​We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging. 
 
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! 
 
Website in the spotlight
 
We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) 
 
The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. 
 
As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. 
 
Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. 
 
Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. 
 
So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). 
 
But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. 
 
Starting wide
 
As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) 
 
In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. 
 
So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:

• Deeper dive customer discovery. Through a series of structured strategy sessions, we really dived into the new prospects they were targeting. What are their pain points? What are they doing now? What are their best alternative options, besides out client? What might “trigger” them to make a switch? Who are the secondary targets we needn’t address directly, but wouldn’t mind attracting? Who are the “tire kickers” we want to avoid engaging with? (We have a great article on that topic, by the way.) 

 

• Narrative creative concepts. Once we had nailed down the customer persona (sometimes called the “avatar” or ICP for Ideal Customer Profile), we worked up a number of written descriptions of what the new website would look and feel like. These “narrative creative concepts” are very time- and cost-efficient. They describe the theme, tone, and feel of a proposed new site’s treatment, talking about the imagery, copy, amount of white space, navigation, and so on. And we provided several to choose from, each with a slightly different creative approach. The client then picked their favorite. 

 

• Website wireframe. We then wrote this up, outline-style, and reviewed it with the client—moving, re-prioritizing, and adding and cutting as needed, until we had a nice tight version. (Want to learn more about how we do this—and you can, too? We’ve got a nice article you can check out.) 

 

• Pilot pages. No, we’re not gonna describe them here in this little bullet. These warrant their own subhead. 

 
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages!
 
Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons: 

• One: It’s essential to steer them in the right direction for what they will undertake. Not “kinda/sorta the right direction.” And that’s because of Reason Two: 

 

• Two: That’s a lot of people, working hard. It ain’t cheap. We’re frugal with our customers’ marketing spend here at Copel Communications. 

 
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. 
 
So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. 
 
Answer: No. 
 
Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” 
 
They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. 
 
The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. 
 
Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. 
 
Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours. 

​We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress. 
 
But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. 
 
Grab the lowest-hanging fruit
 
Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. 
 
But what if that were already done for you? 
 
Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. 
 
These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” 
 
Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. 
 
And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. 
 
That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. 
 
By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. 
 
Update what you bring
 
Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. 
 
This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). 
 
Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. 
 
Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. 
 
Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. 
 
This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? 
 
Don’t reinvent the wheel
 
Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?”
 
It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. 
 
Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. 
 
Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. 
 
And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. 
 
For the love of QR codes
 
How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). 
 
Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. 
 
Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in. 

​Every hear of a “paper edit”? Probably not. 
 
Let’s dive, quickly, into the topic you tuned in for: Making the easiest marketing videos you’ll likely ever make. 
 
It gets better. They’ll also be among the least expensive to produce. 
 
And they’ll also be among the most powerful. 
 
Salivating yet? Let’s get started. 
 
Recycling is good for the planet… and your business
 
A client of ours recently recently pitched a new prospect via a Zoom call. Specifically, they “ran the demo” of the company’s offerings, which included both a PowerPoint slide deck and a demo of specific SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings. 
 
The call went great. Our client closed the deal. What could be better than that? 
 
How about closing lots of deals? 
 
From the exact same call.
 
You’re smart. You’re already way ahead of us here. Why do we even try to build any suspense? LOL! 
 
The key: Our client recorded the Zoom call. With the prospect’s permission, of course. Important point: the recording did not show the prospect on screen. Only our client, who was presenting. 
 
That recording is worth its weight in gold. It’s a verbatim capture of the best possible sales pitch, with our client hitting it out of the park. 
 
The entire video ran about 20 minutes. 
 
And in it, our client—the one who was running the demo—was making killer point after killer point, with each one nicely illustrated by either a powerful preso slide or quick SaaS demo. 
 
We watched this video, and realized that it was marketing gold, being served to us on a platter. 
 
The paper edit
 
“Paper edit” is an old-school video editing term, which surprisingly isn’t so old-school or even outdated. It’s exactly what we created in this case. And it’s what you can do, too. 
 
(You know you’ve got some good recorded Zoom pitches by now. And if you don’t, you know you’re just itching to record your next one.) 
 
Here’s the task. Take that 20 minutes of raw footage, and convert it into as many little McNugget-sized videos as you can. They should run anywhere from about ten to 30 seconds each. 
 
So you just need to park the video in a window on one side of your screen, and a blank Word doc on the other. Watch the video and look for the organic “start” and “end” points of each little mini-video. Write down the time codes for each. Then come up with a title for that specific mini video. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ll have a “paper edit” which you can hand off, along with the big raw-footage file, to your favorite/least-expensive video editor. You will have done the heavy lifting; at this point, your editor simply needs to follow your instructions. 
 
They’ll need to create a master “set of bookends” first: This will be the opening title card, underlying music bed, and tail-end/call-to-action (CTA) title card. Once you approve those, you’re off to the races. Your editor will be able to crank these out like a machine.
 
In our case, the 20 minutes of raw footage yielded more than 20 different short videos. They were so simple to create, that we didn’t even need our usual high-end editor for this assignment. Rather, we handed off the footage and the paper-edit doc to our client’s digital marketing firm; they were able to make these little vids for us—and put them to use, too, since they were able to easily fold them into the account’s digital marketing strategy. 
 
Sure, we continue to make slick, highly-produced videos for this same client. But they’re more expensive and less frequent. These little videos are awesome for keeping the world informed and teased, while easily building up your social presence on platforms like LinkedIn, simultaneously boosting the brand and impressions. 
 
Need help with an assignment like this, or others? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​"Ghost Email Writer.” Kind of an odd role to put on your resume, no? 
 
It’s on ours. More importantly for you, however, is the answer to this question: 
 
Which business emails that you need to send are so important that they would warrant having a pro step in to pen them?
 
That’s what we’ll explore in this article. 
 
Touchy subjects
 
There is a common thread when it comes to emails that we ghost-write for our clients. It’s generally what we’d call “the big ask,” which kind of goes hand-in-hand with “the humble brag.” Both of these are hard to do. They put you, as the writer, in an uncomfortable situation. 
 
Err in one direction, you look like a jerk. Err in the other, you appear too meek. And in both of those situations, you don’t end up getting what you’d wanted. Talk about a fine line. 
 
First things first: You don’t really need to hire a professional writer, like us, to write an email like this. You can really work your tail off, and polish it, run it by colleagues, and even push it through ChatGPT if you want it to sound generically-correct enough. The question is: Is that worth your time? If you’re reading this article, chances are, it’s not. (Spoiler alert: We charge a mere pittance for things like these, for our clients, especially considering the upside ROI they deliver.) 
 
But so far we’ve been dealing with generalities. Let’s dive in and give you two real-life examples. 
 
Ghost-Written Email Example 1: To a former client
 
We recently helped a client create a series of marketing videos for their B2B consultancy. On their website, they’d had an ancient, but great, testimonial from an old client of theirs. They hadn’t spoken to this client in ages. 
 
Can you guess where this is going? 
 
Of course. A written testimonial, on a website, doesn’t do you much good when you’re creating marketing videos. Talk about a big ask: We wanted this former client to record themselves, on camera, giving a testimonial about this company that they’d worked with, a long time ago. 
 
Yikes. 
 
And so our client asked us to ghost-write the big-ask email for them. Confession: It wasn’t easy. 
 
But the finished product went something like this: It opened with a “Hello, old friend, we hope you’re doing well,” followed by “we’re so glad that our company has helped your company succeed.” We also thanked them for letting us use their written testimonial on our website. 
 
And that was the segue to the videos we were making. We’d already had the first one produced by the time we ghost-penned this email, so we included a link to it, so that the former client could watch it and see how good it was. 
 
Then we got down to the big ask: Could they simply read that same testimonial on camera, and send it to us? We even included its text in the email, like a script. We noted that, “By our estimation, this should take about, well, 15 seconds! So hopefully it’s not a huge ask.”
 
And we closed by saying, “Just as we have helped your company, you’d be doing us a huge solid by helping ours.”
 
The email worked. The old client was flattered by the request, and promptly obliged by recording and sharing a quick video. Bonus: Our client’s firm suddenly became top-of-mind for this former great client. Talk about a nice dollop of biz-dev! 
 
Ghost-Written Email Example 2: To “the secret handshake club”
 
Whereas the previous example was written to be sent to one specific, known person, this next one was intended to be sent, one-to-one, to a select number of very exclusive recipients who were all total strangers to the sender.
 
We need to be very cagey here, as this one is super sensitive. That said, it’s one of the best emails we’ve ever written, and it’s ended up netting our client millions. 
 
This client of ours had carved out a profitable B2B niche doing technical “cleanup work” for large enterprises. But they longed to broaden the business, and their client base, to include the specialists who helped those enterprises create the situations that inevitably required cleanup afterward.
 
Those specialists were the targets of the email. We can refer to them here as “the secret handshake club,” because that’s how close-knit, clubby, and insular they are. 
 
Our pitch, which we ghost-wrote for the owner of our consultancy client, went something like this; note how it combines the Big Ask with the Humble Brag:  
 
“Hello Mr. or Ms. Secret Handshake Club Member. I would like to help you as you advise big enterprises as they embark on big initiatives. Full disclosure: I’ve never done this before. But I have helped numerous enterprises with the ‘clean-up’ that’s come from all the overlooked issues in these initiatives, which I’m uniquely qualified to spot, given my experience. Would you have time for a quick call this week?” 
 
Guess what the response was? 
 
It was awful. That’s right. It’s a secret handshake club! Most of the sends ended up with no response whatsoever. The few that did respond, had some choice suggestions for our client, which we can’t reprint here. 
 
But then one—just one— Secret Handshake Club member wrote back. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll bite. Contact my assistant to book a call with me next week.” 
 
And that was all it took. 
 
That call led to a test project. That test project turned a toe-in-the-water tester into a new client. That client effectively provided entry into the Secret Handshake Club. 
 
Fast-forward to today, and that consultancy client of ours now splits their billing, 50/50, between their classic “cleanup” projects and Secret Handshake Club assignments. 
 
And it all started with one inexpensive, yet really well-crafted, ghost-written email. 
 
Have a challenge that warrants a ghost-written email? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building. 
 
We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. 
 
Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? 
 
Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? 
 
Audience first
 
If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. 
 
Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? 
 
Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? 
 
Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. 
 
Working backward
 
So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. 
 
How did they differ from us? 
 
Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. 
 
For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. 
 
Outline, outline, outline
 
Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this: 

• Quick personal background. Knowing we were unique, among this crowd, to have worked in creative services, we were able to do some cool “show and tell” with pencil sketches, layouts, and stories. 

 

• Add credibility. You can—and should—do this, too. Don’t be obnoxious, and don’t belabor it, but don’t miss this opportunity. For example, we’ve served as a judge of the Clio Awards. Even from the beginning, our earliest clients included big names such as Warner Bros. and Taco Bell. 

 

• Who we serve. This, you shouldn’t be shocked, was custom-tailored to the audience and their clientele, too. The point here isn’t to be academic. It’s to build business. 

 

• Teaser on how we work. We have a unique—and, frankly, cool—methodology here at Copel Communications. So we quickly walked through this, as if each audience member were a new client of ours. We went slow. Wanted each cool point to sink in. Get them excited about the process and its possibilities for them.

 

• A referral “in.” Since we were fishing for referrals here, we prepared a list of “Questions you can ask your clients,” the answers to which would likely steer them our way. 

 

• Q&A. Given our six-minute total, we allotted about 2.5 minutes to this—with the obvious invitation for subsequent one-on-one’s with whomever wanted/needed more time. 

 
Close, close, close
 
Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. 
 
A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. 
 
Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time. 

​We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? 
 
Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. 
 
This was not easy. 
 
So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?”
 
Seeing the bigger picture
 
Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. 
 
Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. 
 
So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. 
 
This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. 
 
Chop, chop
 
Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. 
 
Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard.
 
We had to lay out: 

• What we’d received from the client. 

 

• What we still needed from the client. 

 

• What we’d received but didn’t understand or couldn’t make sense of. 

 

• The constraints for the project established by our client’s client—and how all of the above aligned (or didn’t) therewith. 

 

• The goals of the proposed working session. 

 

• A brief overview of that working session’s agenda. 

 
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. 
 
Yup. 
 
We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. 
 
And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose.
 
Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). 
 
This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. 
 
Speed reading
 
Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. 
 
We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. 
 
And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? 
 
Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?”
 
Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished.
 
Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. 
 
And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email.
 
Now do you see the broader lesson here? 
 
People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write.
 
Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​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.