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.
0 Comments
Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world). Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. The cons Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. So… this better be one good meeting. Right? The pros After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in. But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. But later ain’t too bad, either. Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it. No that’s not a brand of beer. When we refer to “Draft Number 10,” we’re talking about Word docs. Oh. Which begs the question: Why embrace that? Just by its moniker, “Number 10,” it’s daunting and annoying. Who in their right mind would ever enjoy, let alone embrace, the tenth draft of anything? Wouldn’t you be automatically burned out? Let’s answer that “in their right mind” question first. This is business, not art If you’re a painter or a poet, up in your garret, you can dream and wile away the hours, finessing your grand opus—“a hundred visions and revisions,” in the words of T.S. Eliot—and you’ve only yourself (and perhaps your muse) to answer to. But we’re not talking about art here, despite our decades of experience (not to mention lots of awards) in creative services. We’re talking about business. Money. Deadlines. ROI. Where, then, does a Draft Number 10 even come from? Quick oh-now-you’ll-get-it answer: A client who’s a perfectionist. Aha. Now everything should make sense for you. We have a client—we’ve actually had lots of clients like this—who’s a perfectionist. Who will revise and revise and revise a draft until it’s almost perfect… and then decide that it’s anything but, and then trash it, and start over, and then revise and revise and revise again, taking us along for the ride. As a creative resource, you could fight this. But you know that that would get you in trouble, and perhaps fired. You could just go with the flow: “Oh, this is the way they like to work. I’ll just… endure it, without complaining.” It’s possible that you could coast along like this indefinitely. But neither of the above approaches benefits anybody. Thus our advice to you in these situations: Embrace it. Heck, enjoy it. See it for the invaluable paid education that it is: Our fastidious client in this story—like most of the clients we’re lucky to work with, whether they’re fastidious or not—is quite brilliant. We would pay to learn their thought processes. To try and osmose just a tiny bit of that genius. Why do they toss Draft 5 and do a wholesale rework for Draft 6? Incidentally, the method behind the madness reveals—if you pay attention—that overall, these drafts get better as they go. It’s not a simple straight slope, were you to graph it. But the trend would be positive. Put it this way: Wouldn’t you love to see Einstein’s notes en route to e = mc2? We get paid for our services. It’s incumbent on us to remain profitable. So we don’t lose money on assignments like this—while, at the same time, we don’t take advantage of our clients’ generosity. And while we get paid in dollars, often the greater reward is the knowledge. The insight. And, frankly, the ability to help other clients like this in similar situations. As we’d said, we’re not along simply for the ride. We dive right in, on every single draft, seeing what’s changed and doing our best to make it better throughout. That’s why our clients entrust us on this journey. Need help with a client, or project, that feels unending? Contact us. We’d be happy—truly happy—to help. Boy is this ever a “modern problems” topic. As a former agency creative director, we’re used to, well, directing creative people. But nowadays, very often, you can’t. You can’t speak to them. You can’t see them. And yet you need to direct, and coach, and motivate them, to do their best work. What gives? The gig economy cometh Back in the day, we’d walk around the bull pen and engage with our artists at their drawing boards (yikes!) and computers. We’d go to recording studios and direct voiceover talent and jingle artists. We’d direct photographers on photo shoots, videographers on video shoots, and so on. Very straightforward. Enter Upwork. And Fiverr. And their ilk. The vaunted “Gig Economy,” wherein people can work, and make money, from anywhere. We’ve weighed in on this topic before. It’s a double-edged blade, which democratizes the availability of talent purveyors to buyers, while also (often) encouraging a race-to-the-bottom mentality when it comes to pricing and (often) quality. We won’t get into that here. What we will get into is the way that these platforms, such as Upwork and Fiverr, force you to work. They expressly forbid the talent on their platforms from engaging with the people who hire them… outside of the limited messaging capabilities of the platform itself. Think about that. We’ve had some tricky video assignments, for example, which we needed to dole out to qualified editors. The requirements for success were nuanced. Know the best way to communicate this to the editor? How about a phone call? Or better yet, Zoom? Nope. Not allowed by Upwork. Or Fiverr. (To the point where they’ll banish these workers from their platforms if they’re caught engaging in such egregious violations of their terms and conditions. The platforms are effectively dangling their livelihoods on a string.) So what do we do? How do we surmount these challenges? Is it possible to make lemonade from such tainted fruit? The pen is mightier than the restraint There’s really only one tool at your disposal if you’re looking to get great work out of these gig-economy vendors. And that’s the written word. Imagine that rousing speech and directions you’d planned (or hoped) to give that vendor in person. Write it down. Verbatim. It’s your only/best choice. Sure, you can, and should, list all the mandatories in the project (“The logo must stay on screen for at least four seconds,” etc.). But you need to put the “carrots” in there, too. We’ve ended some lengthy directions with exhortations such as, “If this one comes out great, there will be others in this series. So impress us!” You’re not some HAL-like computer spitting out commands. You’re a person, doing your best to connect to that vendor on the other side of the gig-platform wall. Be nice. Make friends. And don’t be surprised if the street isn’t exactly two-way. You may spend, say, an hour writing up an incredible input package. And you may get in return something as succinct as “ok got it thx.” Don’t be offended. Just roll with it. You don’t need, say, that graphic artist to spend an hour or two on a beautifully written reply; rather, you want them to devote their time to making beautiful graphics, following your instructions in both letter and spirit. Need help getting the best out of a hybrid team like this? Contact us. We do this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too! ChatGPT, as you know, was huge news about a year ago. So why are we writing about it now? Now is a good time. All the hype has evaporated. All the dust has settled. We can now discuss ChatGPT without the breathless hyperbole, without all the doom-and-gloom forebodings of the apocalypse. Quick teaser: We use ChatGPT. And so should you. Qualifier: When it’s appropriate, and useful, to do so. Let’s dive in. What it is… and isn’t When ChatGPT hit the scene, everyone with a pulse was accosting us about this supposed existential threat to our business here at Copel Communications. Wouldn’t we be subsumed by this marching monster that threatened all creative jobs? No. We weren’t afraid of it then. We’re not afraid of it now. Ignorance is what breeds fear. Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds power. We’ll take the latter any day of the week. ChatGPT, quite simply, is a tool. Just like a hammer. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. It’s only as good as the person using it. You wouldn’t hand a hammer to a surgeon. (Or if you do, run.) The surgeon knows what tools to use. ChatGPT is no different. As a large-language model, it’s capable of stringing together astonishingly coherent sentences in technically excellent English. (Detect our qualifiers there?) It “knows” tons of stuff, effectively from scouring the entire internet (more qualifiers forthcoming). And it’s fast: Ask it something, and it answers. Instantly. All of which begs the question: Is ChatGPT creative? Oh come on. See what difference a year makes? Of course it’s not. It never was. It’s not even intended to be. It’s a tool. We were asked, many years ago, when Apple introduced iMovie, if Hollywood movies would be going away. See? You’re laughing. Because 1) they didn’t go away, and 2) they weren’t exactly threatened by iMovie. To the contrary: A pro version of iMovie (called Final Cut Pro) came out, and many Hollywood editors embraced it. They still do. So now, with all the hype in the rearview mirror, it’s easy—and often quite useful—to embrace ChatGPT. That said, there are some caveats. Some caveats ChatGPT doesn’t “know” everything. As the site itself will warn you, it’s only scoured the internet up through April, 2023. After that, it’s clueless. So don’t expect any recent information in its database. It’s also a classic case of the old computing adage, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or GIGO. There’s a lot of bad, and biased information out there on the internet (really??), and ChatGPT has Hoovered it all up with nary a hiccup. It will spit out the same junk, to you, that it’s sucked up, from others. And ChatGPT doesn’t have a “B.S. meter.” Sometimes, it will flat-out lie. We’ve tested it. So can you. It’s easy. (We’d asked it, for example, to name some famous dialogue quotes from a movie we have effectively memorized. And while it listed several good quotes, it also spat out others that had nothing to do with that movie whatsoever. And no “red underlining,” as you’ll find in Word for a suspiciously-misspelled word. As far as fact-checking goes, you’re on your own.) The good stuff Granted, we don’t use ChatGPT every day. To the contrary: We hardly use it at all. But every now and then, we’ll get an assignment that’s easy to hand off to ChatGPT. And to be clear: We will tell our clients whenever we use ChatGPT. We do this for many reasons:
So what kinds of assignments are good for ChatGPT? In our experience, it’s great for coming up with lots of “ideas” for basic things that have already been ideated by others. That’s a huge distinction. (It’s like the “technically excellent English,” we’d mentioned above—which checks all the boxes for spelling and grammar, but hasn’t an iota of creativity to it.) Some examples:
Now, it’s incumbent on you to ask ChatGPT in the best way possible in order to get the information you seek. We’re good at it; we have a nice feel for how it was programmed, and thus can effectively “reverse-engineer” our prompts. So ChatGPT is like Word. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. Just another tool in our kit. Need help with that next assignment—whether it requires ChatGPT or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! True story: We worked with a client recently who wanted our help, using a shared online Word doc, to rework the copy for one page of marketing material: a website page. The Word doc had a headline at the top. And then a big page of body copy. This was the client’s original, rough draft. As we’d noted, they wanted our help wordsmithing it. This client had booked us, via Zoom, for a one-hour screen-share meeting. And guess what? We spent pretty much the entire meeting just working on the headline. To you creatives out there, this is hardly shocking. But to this person who was an employee at our client and was new to this process, it was shocking. In this article, we'd like to cover 1) why this person was so shocked, 2) why headline writing is so hard, and 3) how you can lubricate the process. Two hands on the paintbrush To be clear: In the story we described above, we were forced to work slower than we usually do. Because we couldn’t just dive into our process; rather, we had to explain our process, at each step, before we undertook each step. So that took a lot more time and was, candidly, rather draining. It’s hard enough to do the work; it’s even harder to do it and describe how you’re doing it at the same time. In other words, a tip of the hat to Bob Ross! As we’ve noted before (specifically in this article), shared Word docs are a double-edged sword, which have a habit of cutting you more than others! Still, let’s discuss why the headline part of this assignment required so much more time than the ensuing body copy; we didn’t even sweat the latter. And that’s part of the reason. With body copy, you’ve got lots of time and space and leeway to make your point. A headline is the opposite. You have just a few words. Plus, a headline needs to be, well, “headline-y.” It has to read like a headline. It has to look good on the page. And it has to sound good in your head—to your inner ear. It needs a good rhythm. And cadence. It must convey the exact right tone: if one word is off, it collapses. Oh, and it should be clever. Good luck with that! Tools for your box A way to help you surmount this challenge—in fact, a few of the component parts at once—is to start with something familiar. If there’s something familiar that rings true, and you can spin it your way, then you’ve got a great headline, seemingly ready-made. Don’t believe us? Look at Apple. Every headline on their website is written to try and meet this exact goal. An example from our business: We wrote a headline for a consultancy that helps businesses transform by using a library of proven templates. The headline we wrote for a page describing that process was: Reinvent your business. Not the wheel. Why does that headline work? It’s the exact same approach we’d just described. Everyone knows the expression, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” But no one had spun it this way before: a ripe opportunity for us, and our client. Anyway, we’d promised you some tools for your box, so here goes. When it comes to headline-writing, lean, liberally, on tools such as:
That person who joined us on the Zoom call was kind-of shocked to follow us down these exact same rabbit holes. They didn’t realize that it took this much time and effort… just to write a headline that’s only a few words long. Know why? Because you can read a good headline in about two seconds. By that token, you can look at a great painting in the same amount of time. Need help with headline-writing? Contact us. It’s a specialty of ours. You’d never tell any client that they’re your favorite. If you say that to one of them, you have to say it to all of them. But c’mon. You know that you have a favorite client. We all do. It’s human nature. It’s also a tacit business proposition: How do you “clone” that client? Wouldn’t you love more of them? (And by extension, fewer of the, um, less-favorite ones?) In this article, we’ll review what makes a “clone-able” client. And then we’ll get to the crux of the matter: Doing the actual cloning. Nobody’s perfect You can certainly describe an “ideal” client. And odds are, your favorite client won’t check all of the boxes. That’s fine. We live in the real world. And it’s hardly a compromise to want to clone your favorite client. But what makes them your favorite? Why are they hovering up near the “Ideal” space? It’s easy to rattle off a bunch of positive attributes of this favorite client of yours:
Wouldn’t that list resonate with you? (Have other attributes we’d missed? Add them to the comments below.) So. How do you go about cloning such a wonderful client? This is a multi-step process—or multi-pronged approach—and while you may know some of the checklist items we’re about to discuss, you probably don’t know them all. The feeding trough Where is this client of yours turning, daily, for information? Are there various groups they belong to? Trade shows they attend? Websites they visit? Answer as many of these as you can for your favorite client, and then “feed from the same trough.” Example: Look up which LinkedIn groups your client belongs to. Then join them. You’ll see the same conversations they’re seeing; you’ll see which posts they like, which articles they read, and which influencers they follow. When you actively join in and comment on a forum like this, LinkedIn rewards you by making your comments visible to more people. In fact, if you can get a vigorous conversation going, LinkedIn will really tell the world about you. We could call this “The Kardashian Effect.” So as your street cred grows, you’ll get exposed to more people like your favorite client. You can then connect with them, comment on stuff they’re posting… and then, politely, ask for a quick chat or Zoom, just to say hello. If you really do this, as a person, and not like some LinkedIn bot that automatically spits out five pages of “personal” messages as soon as you click “Connect” (hate that, don’t you?), you increase your odds of making a real connection. Shake the trees Ask yourself: How did this client find you in the first place? Think through every step of that process—because it contained numerous steps—and then replicate it. Was it a certain person who had referred you? Then reach out to that person. Was it at, say, a certain event? Be sure to attend the next one. On paper, this is a very simple exercise in reverse-engineering. In the real world, few people take the time, or make the effort, to do it. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of doppelganger favorite clients out there, just waiting for you to discover them. Lubricate the revolving door We have a wonderful client that, well, has a high churn rate when it comes to their employees. And what do we do? We stay in touch with those employees when they move on. LinkedIn is great for this. We can’t tell you how many of them have gone on to become new clients of ours, as they’ve brought us along to their new gigs. And they invariably become very good clients, since our original client did such a nice job of vetting these people for us in the first place! These are just a few tips. There are others. For example, we’ve not even touched upon the entire (huge) topic of marketing outreach to this ultra-targeted audience… and that’s really our specialty here at Copel Communications. Want to learn more? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you. It’s that time of year again: Time for the annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. This one is the former. (We’d published the other one recently.) Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of tips and tricks that you can put to use ASAP. Enjoy!
That wraps up this year. And so… Happy New Year! Any topics you’d like to see us address in 2024? Contact us and let us know! Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you! Turkey and stuffing are traditions, so why not a blog about what we’re thankful for? This is kind of an unintentional tradition here at Copel Communications, but the stuff we’re thankful for evolves each year. We post this not just to share the love, but also to inspire. What are you thankful for? Is there stuff that we list below which you’d overlooked? More important, what have we invariably overlooked? Please chime in, in the comments. Creature comforts We’ll do anything and everything we can to get those creative juices flowing each day. That’s actually one of the perks of this job. We get to indulge ourselves in a cocoon-like office space, with everything desirable all within arm’s reach. Ready?
Saving the best for last You should be able to figure out where this is going. Everything we’d bulleted above, while great, is stuff. What are we most thankful for? Of course. It’s people. We’re talking about the great creative folk we have the good fortune to work with among our constellation of vendors. We’re talking about the fantastic clients we’re lucky to serve every day: they keep us challenged and stimulated, and always fail to appreciate just how much free education they shower upon us with their subject-matter expertise. And then what is Thanksgiving without giving thanks to family? It’s why we do anything, everything, that we do. What are you thankful for? Let us know directly, or simply add your thoughts to the Comments below. |
Latest tipsCheck out the latest tips and best-practice advice. Archives
June 2024
Categories
All
|