 Great photo by Grok. We recently had a client assignment that went something like this (don’t worry; we’ll tell you how you can profit from this story in just a moment):
We’d helped them write a huge long-form article for their website, touting their experience with a given industry, in a given U.S. state. Thing is, this client of ours—a B2B consultancy—also had similar experience with other industries. And—you guessed it—in other states, too. On the surface, this is a very simple assignment. You want to broaden your reach, and your SEO rankings, for more than one industry, in more than one state. Sound familiar? Read on. Thinking outside the algorithm Granted, the original article was an SEO play. In other words, it went after very specific long-tail keywords that our client knew were attainable, in terms of search domination. They’d called us in to do the writing. The original article—as you’ll recall, for one industry, in one state—was quite specific and detailed. But now there were two challenges, in terms of making “spin-off” articles: 1. Talking about the other industries. 2. Talking about the other states. Oh. And there was a third challenge, which was arguably bigger than the first two: 3. Convincing Google that none of the spin-off articles were, in fact, spin-off articles. So Challenges 1 and 2 were fairly straightforward. To wit:
(Did we do this 49 times? No. We didn’t. Our client had us rank all 50 U.S. states by population, and we went after the biggest 25. Smart, and cost-effective.) So now, armed with these different buckets of data, it came time to write all of the spin-off articles. Sure, we could’ve commanded Word to do a search-and-replace, on the original article, to plug in “Industry B” for “Industry A,” and even “State No. 2” for “State No. 1.” And even though the resulting article would be totally fine in the eyes of an Industry B prospect living in State No. 2, Google would not be amused. So it was time to get more creative. We had to re-order ideas and arguments, move paragraphs, re-title headlines and subheads, and change the phrasing within most sentences… to the point where the spin-off article was materially different from the original, yet still sold, potently, to the proper audience, toiling in the proper industry, while living in the targeted state. To AI or not to AI We know what you’ve been thinking all this time: Why not hand off a basic assignment like this to ChatGPT? Isn’t that, after all, what it excels at? Yes and no. As we’ve discovered, ChatGPT can really help non-writers look better. For actual writers, the opposite is true. And that was the case here. We actually let ChatGPT take the first stab at this assignment. And its results worked in letter, but not in spirit. There were just too many flubs, none of which would be acceptable to this demanding client of ours. Could we fix those flubs ourselves? Absolutely. And we, at first, tried. But we quickly realized that it was actually less work to follow the process we’d described above than to babysit ChatGPT for this. Fast-forward a few weeks, and all the articles were written and illustrated (with the graphic team taking an analogous approach to ours) and posted online. The client was happy, and most important, the effort paid off in the SEO results. So it was a lot of effort, but certainly worth it. Need help with a tricky assignment like this? While we do a lot of big-picture marketing and creative strategy, we’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and get into the weeds. Contact us and let’s talk.
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 Great photo by Designecologist. 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:
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages! Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons:
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.  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 Matheus Bertelli. Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely:
We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. You might be surprised at the trick to all this. Ready? Aim low. What??? What???? You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. Aim low. Allow us to explain. The attainable cadence The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month? Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. Now take your answer, and cut it in half. Really? Really. The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want. For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. The calendar trick Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. Think of it. You now have two cushions: 1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Zoom! And another year goes screaming past. Are we really ready for our year-end round-up of best-practice articles, written for our beloved creatives audience, here at Copel Communications?
The calendar doesn’t lie. Here’s your chance to catch those ones you’d missed, and/or revisit those that helped:
Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by picjumbo.com We recently worked on a project, for an ad agency, in which they gave us a 22-page PDF wireframe of a new, in-progress website for a client of theirs. Sometimes we create website wireframes for our clients; other times, like this, we’re tasked with helping to populate others' wireframes.
While we could simply tell you about what we did for this client, we want to broaden this article to make it more useful for you. A website—your website—is a big deal. It’s your face to the internet world. You want to get it right. Question everything When we create wireframes for our own clients, we create them as easy-to-follow Word docs, written in outline form. We have a nice article on how you can easily make one of those, too; be sure to check it out here. When we create wireframes for our clients, we always take a customer-back approach: Who is the website trying to reach? What are their needs? What do we want them to do, i.e., what is the call-to-action? More often than not, for our clients who happen to be consultants, the call-to-action or CTA is “book a demo.” So all of this will be well thought-out. You need to think this out, in detail, before you craft your wireframe. We can’t assume that everyone is so diligent. Fortunately, our ad-agency client, in this story, was. That said, we still had questions. Poring through the 22 pages of boxes and arrows and dashed lines, we wanted to know what their client was trying to accomplish, who their audiences were, the tone they wanted to convey, and what the CTA was for each audience. Nicely, they’d created what we’d call a “three-door” website. Their client serves three different audiences, and so there was a clickable tile (“door”) for each, right on the home page. As it turns out, these three audiences were largely different, but still had some traits—and needs—in common. This helped us to develop a unified tone for the overall business, while still addressing the needs of each target audience. Now think of your website and its audiences: Of course they’re different. But how are they similar? What might they have in common? Asking these kinds of questions can help you elevate the entire site and make it more effective. The brain dump Our ad-agency client didn’t want the typical “fill in the spaces” type of web-writing project from us. Rather, they wanted us to brainstorm lots of ideas for each high-level section of the site, so they could pick, choose, and mix-and-match at their will. This was, for us, fun. It was a headline and body-copy free-thought zone, and we came up with tons of stuff for them… which we then selectively edited down, so that they’d actually get 100-percent usable stuff to choose from. In the end, we delivered a 34-page document, consisting primarily of headlines, subheads, and intro body-copy teasers. Fast-forward to the conclusion of this site’s gestation, and we were happy to see lots of our stuff employed in the finished product. So the takeaway is that there’s more than one way to do this. Our ad-agency client gave us a super-structured document, but then told us to freewheel when we got it. Conversely, we’ve worked on other website projects where there are actual slugs of approved copy baked right into the wireframe itself, and we’ll be given very strict input to create very strict output. We can work either way. Have a website challenge on your plate? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Alan Retratos. Landing new business is exciting. It means new assignments, and a new source of revenue. What’s not to get excited about?
We worked with a client recently on some customer-discovery work, and found, counterintuitively, that almost the exact opposite was true. That was the case for them. It may well be the case for you, too. Let’s explain. Who wants what? As part of our near-religious passion for taking a customer-back approach to everything we do here at Copel Communications, we were helping this client of ours—a niche consultancy—to develop their new website by first determining who they wanted it to reach. So far, so straightforward. Now, we need to clothe the details here in anonymity, but we can still make this story clear enough for you to understand and profit from. Historically, this client of ours had worked with various types of customers, whom we were defining as avatars—or, more colloquially, “putting into buckets.” Among those buckets were the “Go-Getters”: the really aggressive customers who offer high reward… for commensurately high risk and high maintenance. There were the “Tire Kickers.” They weren’t an obvious group, at first; it took a lot of discussion to tease them out. But once we did, we realized that we didn’t want to attract any of these energy vampires to the business. (We have an entire article on this topic, which you’ll enjoy.) The third bucket (are you sensing the Goldilocks vibe here?) was what we ended up calling the "Lovably Boring” cohort. They were exactly that: Steady, meticulous, detailed, risk-averse… yet honest, straightforward, trustworthy, and reliable. Bingo. They automatically became our client’s prime target. Weighing the cost and effort to attract, sign, and service them, vs. the revenue and profit potential vs. the other buckets, it became crystal clear… in hindsight, of course. It took a bunch of modeling and number-crunching to reach this conclusion. But once we got there, it was great. You (may) know the old adage: “Speak to the target. Let the others listen.”That was the case here. (Granted, the “Tire Kickers” were kicked right out of the room.) Catering to the un-exciting You might conclude, somewhat logically, that reaching this “boring” audience would itself be a boring assignment. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we’ve said, taking a customer-back approach makes things not easy, but straightforward. And in the case of our “lovingly boring” target audience, it actually made it fun. Imagine: Climb into the head of that super-cautious prospect. What gets them excited? Things like safety and peace of mind. What freaks them out? Things like risky approaches and high-pressure sales. Aha. From here, it became downright enjoyable to create this safe, Eden-like online oasis for this group. Knowing their personalities, and needs, made it straightforward for us to determine what kind of language to use… what kinds of fonts, colors, background video music, amount of white space… all of it. The lesson here is to really follow that customer-back approach. That customer’s values might not align with your values. But you’re not selling to yourself. You’re selling to them. And what, after all, could be more exciting than converting a boring prospect into a paying customer? Need help with customer-discovery challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Angela Roma. 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.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. The competition for talent epitomizes supply-and-demand. We’re not recruiters here at Copel Communications—but we have helped numerous clients of ours to improve the “Careers” page on their websites. That’s our contribution to this challenge.
In this article, we’d like to share some tricks and tips which you can use to make your own site’s “Careers” page more enticing for the people you want to attract. First things first Did you notice the last six words of the previous sentence? They’re crucial: “The people you want to attract.” Before you go changing layouts, or writing copy, or producing videos, think about who the careers page is for. That might sound like a ridiculously simple question. It’s for the people looking for jobs here, duh! But it’s not that simple. Not at all. Let’s plant a few seeds in your head: Who are the job-seekers you want to attract? Naturally, the answer to this question will vary with the open positions you’re posting. And while it’s great to be as focused as possible, the wide range of jobs you may offer generally forces you to, well, generalize. That said, there are some commonalities, given your vertical. Think of it this way: The U.S. Army is always looking for people. But they’re not just soldiers or privates. There are technical jobs, there are leadership roles, there are logistics jobs, finance jobs, you name it. But if you visit the Army’s website, there’s a distinct commonality to the look and feel of the messaging. That’s because they’ve identified the common traits of people who would be considering jobs in the military: These are people who, for example, value structure. Discipline. Strength. Professionalism. Patriotism. Once you know those “target audience” attributes for your business, you can get a much clearer picture of what your “Careers” page will need. Where else are they looking? A job-seeker isn’t just looking at your site. That’s a given. So where else are they looking? For those potential Army recruits, it’s likely... the Navy. Or the Marines. Similarly, you need to look at the “Careers” pages of your competitors and take some notes. The task here isn’t to copy them, but rather to beat them! Now that you know your target audience well, it will be easy to spot the gaps, to detect the tone-deaf messaging, which invariably hinders the competition. Who else might look at this page? This is the question you likely never even considered when creating your site’s “Careers” page. Who, besides job-hunters, would ever look at this page? And why would you ever care? The answer might surprise you. It’s quite possibly prospects for your business itself. Any savvy shopper will want to learn more about you than just the goods and services you offer. This is why your “Team” page and its bios are so important (we have a nice article to help you with that challenge). And it’s why the “outside look” at your “Careers” page is important: A good prospect will want to know how you treat your people. Because that’s a reflection on your business generally—and how you treat other people, such as clients, specifically. So while you may want to convey something like “We’re a no-nonsense organization who pride ourselves on getting things done” to job-seekers, that’s 1) not too exciting for them, and 2) hardly exciting for a prospective client who wants to see the passion and humanity behind the hard work and execution. Sell, sell, sell Now that you’ve answered the three questions above, you can begin to better populate your “Careers” page. To wit: What you’re doing here is basically the intro. That is, all the stuff that comes above the specific job postings. So you want to show off here. Talk about what makes the company such an amazing place to work—better than any other place to work. Are the assignments challenging? Have you automated away the tedious busy-work? How’s the workplace atmosphere? The perks? The work/life balance? What cool things to see and do are nearby? You’re looking for “evergreen” content here—that is, stuff you don’t need to update periodically. Testimonials, from both management and line-level employees, can be killer here. Lights, camera, action Sure, you’ll have intro text about the “Careers” at your business. But this is one area where video really shines. We’ve made “Careers at [Company]” videos for numerous clients, and they come across like a cross between a fun movie trailer and an ad for an adventure vacation. Which leads to a hidden benefit of the “Careers” page video: They reinforce that good feeling among the existing workforce. Your people will watch it and think, “That’s right! I’d forgotten about that perk!” or “Hey, there’s Lexi from Accounting!” and get a renewed appreciation for the great gig they’re lucky to have. We can’t claim that a “Careers” page video will solve all your talent-retention issues. But it makes a little dent. Need help with your company’s “Careers” page? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.  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. |