 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.  Awesome photo by Grok. We don’t claim to be a publishing expert. That said, we have ghost-copy-edited several books, for different clients of ours, over the years. We’ve done everything from boutique self-publishing to working with one of the big-name New York publishing houses.
But the lessons we learned recently—and will share in this article—really underscore how much, and how fast, the world of book publishing has changed, in just the past few short years. Big boys can be bullies Boy were we ever disappointed, not terribly long ago, when we helped a client of ours shepherd their book through the process/wringer of a major you-know-their-name publishing house. We—mistakenly—thought that our client would get the white-glove treatment from this storied icon. Were we ever wrong. Their business model had followed—or perhaps preceded—the seismic shifts that have upended the music industry. Rather than the publishers having all the power, it’s effectively the influencers who have all the power. So if you’re, say, an indie rock band and you’ve got a zillion followers on TikTok, you hold all the cards. Why fork over your hard-earned money to some record label? Ditto for publishing. You can self-publish, pretty easily, these days (more on that in a minute), and if you can drive lots of followers and sales, then what value does a publisher—regardless of how big or how storied—have to add? This is, unfortunately, a double-edged sword. In the case of our client, they’d written a brilliant manuscript, but weren’t exactly Kardashians in terms of their social-media influence. And that was all, apparently, that the big-name publisher cared about. They peppered us with questions, such as:
And one other, which we were shocked to hear:
Ouch. You’d think that as publishers, their job would be to, well… publish. But no. They’re looking for coat-tails to ride. They want to “barnacle” themselves onto a trend, rather than expend the effort and capital to start one, regardless of how trend-worthy that manuscript might be. How disheartening. But the story does get better. The Magazine Magnate Before we get to the silver-lining chapter, we have one more churn-your-stomach tale to tell. We worked with another client, recently, and helped them to complete their book manuscript. Shortly thereafter, our client was approached by another huge-name publisher, known primarily in the magazine world, but who were now leveraging their brand name to create a publishing service to authors like our client. Hmmm. Intriguing. Well, it was, until we dived into their sales pitch. They would publish the book. And they would push out a press release for it. And they would feature it on their website. Now, in stark contrast to the old-school publisher we’d mentioned in the previous story—who, to their credit, paid our client an advance (i.e., money) against future sales for the manuscript—this magazine-magnate wanted to charge this other client of ours for the privilege of having their big name on the spine of the book… along with the aforementioned press release and website page. So now the money is flowing in the opposite direction. But okay. We’ll bite. How much did Magazine Magnate want for this service of theirs? Well, they offered different tiers. The cheapest one was $67,000.00. The priciest one topped out at $122,000.00. Can you say “Vanity offer targeted at ‘authors’ whose wallets are as inflated as their egos?” We politely declined. Goliath, meet David As we’d teased above, there is a silver lining to our client’s story—and for your book-publishing aspirations, too, especially if you don’t feel like self-educating on the arcana of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service which, while valuable, requires a ton of heavy lifting on your part. Turns out there’s a whole category of vendors out there known as book aggregators, and they do pretty much everything, for a sliver of the price we’d mentioned above. Example: For our client who declined the Magazine Magnate, they went with an aggregator who created a print-on-demand book and e-book version thereof, and distributed it to storefronts such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and tons of others. And the whole budget was under $3k. So there’s no “advance” against sales; you’re betting with your own money. But if you can, say, sell more than $3k worth of books, you’re already in the black, and royalty checks will just keep on coming. So you can see why the old-school publishers are now very old school. Their business model has been shaken to the foundations. What value do they add, beside a logo on the spine? We’ll leave it to you to answer that question. Need help with a book project? We’ve worked on enough of them by now to have experience to offer that, we’d wager, you’d deem valuable. Contact us to learn more.  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 Juliano Couto. 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.  Great photo by Samson Katt. 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.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio Here at Copel Communications, we’re proud to have a diverse clientele. Sometimes it’s so diverse, it can be challenging—to the point where successfully addressing these challenges generates some teachable moments. Hence, this article.
We recently worked on a social-campaign assignment for a very big global brand; while we can’t name them in this article, you certainly know who they are. To be more specific (about the assignment, and not the brand, LOL! we need to be delicate here), we were brought on by one of this brand’s multiple ad agencies. This agency specializes in addressing a certain ethnic market in the U.S. and overseas. And their specialization derives from the fact that they, themselves, belong to this same ethnic group. (It’s really hard to tell this story while protecting identities!) So. They handed us some creative, which they had developed, and the Big Brand had approved, for a social campaign touting one of the brand’s products. And the creative—the visuals, and the ideas—were really thoughtful and inspired. The campaign consisted of different little multi-panel vignettes that would tell the story of a certain person, depicted in them. It went something like this: Imagine there are five panels that will go by, almost like a little slide-show of memes. The first four establish this likeable person—whom the target audience can easily relate to—and their situation. Their situation, mind you, is aspirational-yet-flawed. They aim high, but there are constraints on their dreams. Guess where this is going? Of course. Panel Five introduces Big Brand’s Great Product, which, you guessed it, organically solves all of Hero’s problems in one fell swoop. We’ve over-simplified this a bit here, but you get the gist. Lost in translation Now why on earth, you may well be wondering, was Copel Communications brought in for this assignment? It certainly seems like it’s a wonderful campaign, neatly tied up with a bow. Well, almost. The problem here—and it was a big one—was the copy. Remember: Each “slide” in each of the campaign’s hero stories was effectively a meme: A photo with a quote, title, or caption. And while the ideas for all of these were great, the original copy had been written in Ethnic Audience’s Homeland Language, i.e., not English. Oh. So the Google-translated-to-English copy was clunky and needed help. On its surface, this seems like an easy, straightforward, and fun assignment. It was neither of the former, and hardly the latter. Why? Because, as easily as we could see where each of these panels (and there were tons of them, effectively five for each of the numerous “heroes” selected) needed to go, that didn’t make our client’s English any better. Example: One of the panels showed a young barista, working in a coffee shop. He’s our hero. Remember: aspirational-yet-flawed. So the input caption we were handed read: My job is hard. Gee. My job is hard. He’s a barista, right? So we came up with this version: Life can be a grind. Cute, huh? And so we got big pats on the back from the client, and we were happily endorsing a check five minutes later. Yeah right. Here’s the problem: The client didn’t understand “Life can be a grind.” So they kicked it back to us, instructing us to make it more like “My job is hard.” And, by extension, our job was hard! There’s not a huge lesson we can simply spout from this story. There were a zillion revisions and, not shockingly, for one of the “hero stories,” after they rejected Version 10, we used their suggestions for Version 11 to gently suggest that they re-visit Version 1 and, you guessed it, that was the one that flew. The takeaway? Assignments like this boil down to patience, and trust. The skill is just a subset. Need help with an outside-English-to-English assignment? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Alena Darmel. 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.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio A client of ours recently wanted us to rewrite their team members’ LinkedIn bios, and then their website bios, in that order.
Would you do the same thing? Should you? In that order? In this article, we’ll look at some of the too-easy pitfalls of team bio-writing, and also give you some good, quick, useful tips that can help you look great, and drive more business. Who’s on first? When that client asked us to start with the LinkedIn bios, we suggested otherwise. In this instance, it was better to start with the company’s own website. That’s because it was more free-form, less rigid than LinkedIn. We could do whatever we wanted. We could steal from it, for LinkedIn, later. And that’s what we did. For your business, you want your and your team’s bios to effectively accomplish two things: 1) You want to establish that person’s credibility. Do they know their stuff? Are they the absolute go-to subject matter expert for their field? 2) You want to make them come across as likable. (Not that they aren’t already.) The goal here is for the reader to think, “If I’m gonna be working with this company for the next several months, I’d be happy to work with this person. They seem cool.” Teaser alert: You can actually address both of these goals in order. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Person to person As you surely know, some website bios are written in first person (“I’m in charge of Finance”), whereas others are written in third person (“Jill is in charge of Finance”). Which should you use? (By the way, “Which should you use?” is in second person. But we digress.) Consider the arguments for each:
So this seems easy, right? “First person” carries the day. Not so fast. Think of Goal 1 from above: Establish Credibility. Here, you’ll want to blitz the reader with name-dropping and awards and accolades, so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about how technically superior this person is. Uh-oh. If you write that in first person, it comes across as conceited. Really conceited: “I have won awards for my work with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon, where clients always told me how great I am.” Uggh. Don’t go there. And so, third person it is. More often than not: “Jill has won numerous client-elected awards for her stellar performance working with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon.” The second act As we’d hinted above, the bio follows a two-act structure, in the order of the two goals ("Expertise," and "Fun to Work With"). So after you’ve wowed your reader with all the awards and name-dropping, you can get into just a few interesting, quirky details which are nice setups for conversation-starters when a client first engages you. We recently read the bio of a client we were going to work with, and it noted that she had previously served in an exotic location overseas, so we were curious to ask her about that. Stuck for ideas—or for getting consistent responses from your team—for this Act II assignment? We once helped an ad agency write their team bios, and we worked up a questionnaire which was circulated to the entire team. The initial questions were predictable:
But then, to button it, we made the last question a fill-in-the-blank:
They loved it. The answers were great and off-the-wall, and there was hardly any work required to edit them down to make them website-palatable. Indeed, the ad agency kept the “Questionnaire” format on their website—a good example of when First Person actually is the better way to go. Tying it all up Some basic pointers:
That said, leaders’ bios should generally be longer than team members’ bios. Twice as long is completely fine.
And that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it’s really more straightforward than easy. The more succinct the bio, the better—and the more challenging. Need help? Contact us. We’ve helped lots of teams with tons of bios. And we’d be delighted to help you, too.  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. |