 Great photo by Grok. In case you were unaware, here at Copel Communications, we alternate our blog articles between those directed toward business owners/consultants (at the top of the month), and our “creatives” audiences of ad agencies and other creative folk (at mid-month).
This article is one of the latter. And it begins with a story. A colleague called us up not long ago, bemoaning the fact that her creative agency (we’re obfuscating/anonymizing here) had seen a sudden drop in business, since all of her clients were switching to AI for their creative work. To say she was unhappy was an understatement; there was a distinct edge of panic in her voice. But was she right? And how does this story relate to you, and your business? Are the ubiquitous doom-and-gloom headlines correct? And what the heck is an “Upwork moment,” which we’d teased in the headline? Let’s unpack this part-by-part. They’re going where? A little more (fudged/anonymized) info about this colleague of ours. Her creative agency serves big you-know-them national brands. They’ve entrusted her and her great staff, for years, to deliver beautiful hand-crafted creative which elevates these brands to their respective audiences. Collectively, there’s billions of dollars of brand equity at stake here. Now ask yourself an obvious question: Are these huge brands suddenly asking ChatGPT to do the same thing for them? Yeah, we’re laughing, too. These huge brands know that ChatGPT can’t come close when it comes to quality. They also know that ChatGPT (or any other widget of its ilk) treads in very murky waters when it comes to copyright clearance. Do you honestly think that they’d risk their billion-dollar brands on that? Do you think that they would dump our colleague and her team, in order to get such sketchy and legally-questionable content… merely to save a few bucks? You think they don’t have “a few bucks”? Or is the answer perhaps far more mundane? Spoiler alert: It is. As we’d told our colleague: “This isn’t AI. It’s just a downturn. A basic dip in your business, wherein a few accounts happen to be slow at the exact same time.” You could hear her sigh of relief. “Oh,” she said. “That, I can deal with.” It was, in short, familiar territory. Solve-able via old-school tricks like shaking the trees and good old-fashioned business development or biz-dev. Beware the ostrich Does this mean that AI isn’t a threat, or at least a factor? Get your head out of the sand. It’s a real thing. But then again, so was Google. So was the internet. We’re still breathing. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. Which brings us back to our “Upwork moment.” Several years ago, back around 2013, Upwork and other gig-economy platforms, such as Fiverr, burst onto the scene. Many people predicted that they would rob us of all our work and that we here at Copel Communications would promptly go out of business. We’re still breathing. The sky is still blue above us. But Upwork and Fiverr are still here and thriving. So what gives? As it turns out, Upwork was a really great find for businesses who, say, wanted dirt-cheap copywriting and didn’t care too much about the quality. So if you wanted to hire a writer from India who would create a 2,000-word blog for 15 bucks, Upwork was a godsend. This did not put us out of business. All it did was to better delineate various strata of clients and providers—and we don’t interact with either of them. Our work is higher-end than that, and our clients are, too. If you’ve read this far into this article, 1) thanks, and 2) you’re likely in the same watertight boat. Which gets back to AI. Sure, there are tons of people, worldwide, for whom AI/ChatGPT-generated content is good enough, and you certainly can’t beat the price. That is, free. For them, it’s a godsend. For us—and for you, and for our now-breathing-again colleague—it’s just another way the rest of the landscape is evolving around us. The sky ain’t falling tomorrow, either. Have a comment? Leave it in the comments below, or feel free to contact us directly.
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 Great photo by Grok. Wait. What? SEO for YouTube? Is that even a thing?
Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO gurus. But fortunately, some of our clients are. So we learn a lot. And when it’s prudent and discreet to do so, we’ll share some of the love. Hence this article. Short takeaway/spoiler: You can, and should, max out the SEO for your YouTube videos. In this article, we’ll discuss how. But first, the genesis of this story. As we’d noted above, this comes to us from an actual client assignment which, as we write this, is ongoing; they have tons of YouTube videos (most of which, incidentally, we also scripted). The challenge, as our client made clear, was to drive more search-query traffic to this huge repository of videos, spread across multiple playlists on our client’s YouTube channel. But how? There are two parts to this. Both are basic, yet nuanced. They are: 1. The actual title of the video. 2. The YouTube description of the video Let’s review each. 1. The title We’re talking B2B videos here. So you might have an existing video about a product or service that you offer to prospects. And what’s its title? Sure, it’s something like “Our Great Product.” You must understand that there’s the real world, and then there’s the SEO world. In the real world, populated solely by humans, “Our Great Product” is a perfectly good title. It tells people what the video is about. Simple. No clutter. Great. But in SEO World, it’s unfortunately insufficient. You want to “think backward” from what someone who would ultimately want that product or service would be searching on in, say, Google (or in AI; more on that in a minute). So if your Great Product solves Challenge X for, say, logistics executives, you might want to revise and expand the title accordingly: “Challenge-X-Solving Product for Logistics Executives Seeking Productivity Gains.” Not terribly exciting in the real world, but a step forward in SEO Land. But wait. That new title is pretty darned long. Aren’t there limits on this, imposed by, say, YouTube? There sure are. Titles max out at 100 characters, including spaces. The one we just noted above was only 66. So there’s room to play. Often, depending on the viewing device (desktop or laptop browser, tablet, or phone), that title will get truncated and lopped off with just an ellipsis (three dots or “. . .”) after the first few words. Meaning, the first few words are the most important. Because those are the ones that will stick. So factor that into your re-naming. Put the most important stuff first. It's not the real world. Sure, humans will read this stuff, too, but they’re only part of the audience. The rest is web crawlers, spiders, and all the algorithms that the search engines employ to serve up results which hopefully include your video. Now that you know about 1. The Title, let’s proceed to 2. The description Clearly, this is much longer than the title, but some of the same rules apply. Stuff will get cut off before you see the clickable “…more” to reveal the rest of the copy; a quick test on our desktop browser clipped it off at around 60 words. The max is 5,000 characters (not words), which can include links, text, and hashtags. That’s a lot of copy. It’s almost like a blog. About 1,000 words. Again, you want to fill this with info that your human searchers are searching for (what problems will the product or service showcased in your video solve?), as well as what the web crawlers want to find. For our recent project, these videos often offered solutions that helped with numerous arcane technology platforms, so we included bullet lists of those platforms in the description. The search engines like stuff like that. Know what they don’t like? Verbatim copy stolen from your website; they’ll ding you for that. So you want original copy. And you want it written by a human. All the search engines can spot AI-written copy from a mile away (as can we), and they’ll ding you for it. Which gets back to AI-based search vs. classic Google search. The landscape is still shaking out as we write this; even the term AEO (“ask engine optimization”) may not have legs. But what we’re seeing already is a refreshing overlap of what makes for good SEO content vs. AEO content. If you can nail the SEO side, the AEO side will likely catch up. Bottom line: Depending on the number of YouTube videos you already have posted, this could be a quick or long-term retrofitting assignment. And it should definitely shape your efforts for future videos; write the new titles and YouTube descriptions at the same time that you write the scripts. It will save you time and effort. Need help with any of this stuff? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  The joy of de-selecting. Do not get us wrong. We are not luddites here at Copel Communications! We love shiny new tech.
We use AI a lot, too. So don’t think that this article—about yanking the plug on Apple Intelligence—is about some kind of irrational fear of technology. Nope. It’s far simpler than that. It’s about helping our clients to make money. Wait, what?? Apple Intelligence stands in the way of that? A solution in search of a problem The comedian John Mulaney once compared his aging body to the iPhone: each year it looks the same, but it just gets worse. LOL! We’ve been on Apple tech since the very first generation of Macs, so we have a well-entrenched more-love-than-hate relationship with the folks in Cupertino. But Apple Intelligence crossed a new threshold for us. Sure, you’ve seen all of the “ingenious” new features that Apple will foist on you, every single year, with every new OS update, whether it’s for your Mac, your iPhone, whatever. Each one purports to be the greatest thing ever—which is a tacit admission that the very thing it’s replacing, which had been identically hyped at its outset… wasn’t. Fine. It’s easy for us to throw stones, and we’re well aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” quote (the important part: “It’s not the critic who counts”). And besides, every time Apple rolls out a controversial feature, it typically back-pedals with a new slider whereby you can disable it. Liquid Glass, anyone? You certainly remember--remember? it’s still ongoing—all the hype around Apple’s version of AI. It was so special that it wasn’t just AI, i.e., artificial intelligence. Oh no. The “A” now stood for “Apple.” Apple Intelligence. Capitalized. It would solve everything in your life. Until it didn’t. The last straw As we’ve taken pains to make clear: We’re not afraid of technology. When Apple Intelligence rolled out, and even as it got updates and bug fixes, we stuck with it, waiting (and wondering) for it to help us in our daily lives. Until it tried to answer emails and text messages on our behalf. Woah. Stop the presses. It’s one thing to suggest some verbiage. It’s another to insert it into a reply by default, whereby our accidentally depressing the spacebar would constitute “Send.” A client asked us a question. We were about to give them a well-considered and nuanced answer, with a few factors to consider. And there’s Apple Intelligence, replying to our client with “Sounds great! I agree!” Fortunately, we caught this before any damage was done. Here at Copel Communications, clients pay us for our intelligence. The real kind. Not the over-hyped artificial kind. Hence the illustration for this article. We effectively rocketed our way to System Prefs to disable this hallucinogenic digital sidekick. Should you? Your choice. But now you know where we stand. And should you contact us, you also know that you’ll get a real reply, from a real sentient human.  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!  Great photo by Grok. If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them.
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. Division of labor When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. And that may well be true, in that instance. But that is not what we’re talking about here. Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. After that, however, it gets fuzzier. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period. It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!” And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit.  Great photo by Grok. Steve Jobs famously said “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”
What did he mean by that? Is that a hard-and-fast rule that you should never break? If not, when should you break it? And most importantly, how can you generate more revenue from the answers to these questions? Let’s dive in! Creative inference That (in)famous Steve Jobs quote was about his notion of eschewing focus groups when it came to product development. His thinking was, that if you’d asked a customer, say in 1983, what they “wanted,” in terms of electronic brainpower, they would have simply said “a better calculator.” They couldn’t envision a Macintosh, because they didn’t know what was technically possible, nor how to transform that technology into a wholly new product category which would surprise and delight them at every turn. Gee. Steve Jobs was onto something. Who’da thunk? Is this a hard-and-fast rule? Hate to be squishy, but it depends. If you really want to nail product or service development, you can certainly borrow a page from Steve Jobs. The whole idea of creatively inferring what customers want, based on their day-in-the-life situation, is a specialized practice that doesn’t come naturally to many business owners; as such, there are consultancies (and we’ve worked with them) which specialize in this. Let’s talk about marketing. And let’s assume, for now, that you’ve got a product or service to sell which already checks the surprise-and-delight boxes for your customers. If those customers are repeat customers, you have an opportunity here. Yep: you can ask them things. Oh, the sacrilege! Survey the situation We recently helped a client craft a customer-satisfaction survey campaign. We say “campaign,” because it included a few components. Pay attention, and you’ll get ideas for your own business: Our client had always conducted customer-satisfaction surveys at the conclusion of any engagement with any of their clients. It was, and is, a sound business practice: It helps them to continually improve. But, assuming that they’re doing most things very well, it also makes for a very nice marketing opportunity. Think about that: Let’s say you’re a client of this company. They just served you very nicely. You’re about to move on, and lose that precious top-of-mind awareness of what they do… when you get a friendly email from them, asking you to please complete their customer-satisfaction survey. Aha. You’re instantly reminded of them! When you complete the survey, you’re instantly reminded of just what they did, and how good they were at it. What a wonderful reinforcement! …But what if you don’t complete the survey? Then what? Well, you still got the email, inviting you to participate. And there was another dollop of incentive therein; as we’d said, this was a “campaign.” Sweetening the deal The customer-satisfaction survey email was a classic opportunity for our client—and for you, reading this—to easily capture low-hanging re-sell and/or up-sell opportunities. That’s because the email included a referral offer. It went something like this: “Complete the survey, and we’ll send you a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Bonus: After you’ve completed the survey, you can earn a $500 Amazon Gift Card by referring a new client to us. And to make you feel better about referring us, you can tell your friends that we’ll give them a $1,000 discount off of our services because you sent them our way! Everyone wins!” You got that right. Everyone wins. So. The survey is somewhat anti-Jobsian, in that it asks customers how they feel about something that they already bought. But in that regard, Apple is no different: We’ve actually received surveys from them, asking us about products we’ve purchased from them… which have actually included radio-box options for products and features that Apple has not released yet (32-inch iMac, anyone?) So much for their ultra-secretive/customer-detached company culture. You can also use this technique for other, very basic stuff: What topics would your clients like to see addressed in your upcoming blogs, webinars, or YouTube videos? Ask them. And if you toss in, say, a referral program along with the ask, we surely won’t hold it against you. Have a marketing challenge you could use help with? 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. Intrigued?
“ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes?” Has Copel Communications completely lost its few remaining brain cells? Not yet. Stay with us on this. And learn how—no kidding—this observation can help your business make more money. Here’s a dirty little secret. While we specialize in marketing here at Copel Comms, we’re really “closet salespeople.” Think of the playwright who shudders at the prospect of getting on stage… but is completely comfortable writing a powerful speech for the play’s leading man to deliver. That’s us. Okay. Shoes? ChatGPT? Is there a thread anywhere in this story forthcoming? Sure there is. As we’d said, stay with us. ChatGPT, and all of the generative large-language-model AI platforms of its ilk, have really changed the way that people sell. The way that you can sell. And, upstream of that, the way you market. Shortly after it appeared on the scene, ChatGPT basically torpedoed email-based marketing and outreach—and thus the sales that those were supposed to generate. The reason is simple: It used to be that only reasonably intelligent English speakers could create grammatically correct outreach notes. ChatGPT eliminated that requirement. Since its advent, every mouth-breather who can click a “Generate” button has been able to churn out grammatically flawless… spam. Yep. Spam. The ISPs quickly clamped down on this. The spam filters got tighter. Even now, Google (in a related story) is tweaking its algorithms to filter out AI-generated content. But ChatGPT is old news. The platform debuted during the pandemic, for goodness’ sakes. The “old news” aspect of this story is good news for our clients and businesses like yours. We’re seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of email outreach again. Isn’t that nice? And, just like in the old days, quality matters. Remember the ol’ “three-legged stool” of email marketing? It consisted of the quality of:
Guess what? That’s true again. Which gets to shoes. Specifically, “shoe leather.” We’re talking about the old days, when salespeople would “pound the pavement,” going from business to business, to the point where they would wear holes in the leather soles of their shoes. Hence “shoe leather.” ChatGPT does not wear shoes. It doesn’t understand how you can (and perhaps should) “pound the pavement” to actually generate sales. Example: We recently penned an email (is that a mixed metaphor? We actually used a keyboard) for a client of ours, directed toward their current clients, introducing a referral program for their services. Per best practice, the offer was “two-sided”: “Refer a client to us, and they’ll get a massive discount on our services. And you’ll get an Amazon gift card. Everyone wins!” So. It was a matter of taking this good offer (Leg 2), turning it into a compelling message (Leg 3), and sending it out to our client’s list of existing customers (Leg 1). Another dirty little secret: The client’s list of clients was small enough that no automation was needed. So “Dear [First Name]” was typed in as “Dear Linda,” and so on. Sure, it was old-fashioned manual labor. But it was effective. Proving that pounding the pavement, in its modern iteration, can still yield sales. And proving that ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes. Need help with a marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. We recently saw what we’re about to describe, and it left us aghast.
Learn from the little tale we’re about to spin! What you’re reading—this article, these very words—is a blog entry. Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been posting articles like this, every two weeks, for more than ten years, now. Thank you. We knew you’d be impressed. But what is this horror-inducing tale? you’re surely asking. And what does that have to do with the title of this article? Okay. Maybe you’re not asking. We already knew you were smart. And likely figured it out already. But stay with us. So. We post blogs on a regular cadence. Twice a month. At the top of the month, each month, our blogs are more focused on our consultants audience. At mid-month—like this article—they’re more broadly geared toward our creatives audience. And yes, they certainly overlap. You don’t need to be running an ad agency to get a good takeaway, from this article, for your business. As we’d said. Every two weeks. Like clockwork. Now you don’t need to do them every two weeks. That’s our cadence. But man oh man. It is a cadence. Here’s the story: We were recently connected with a gentleman who was running his own creative agency; it specialized in web design. We’d been introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and had booked a Zoom call. Prior to the Zoom call, we did our due diligence. That is, we checked out this web designer’s website. And this is where we had our holy !@#$ moment. Just like our site—and almost everyone else’s—this designer’s website had a “Blog” section. (It could also be called “Recent Posts.” Same thing.) So we decided to check it out. And when we got there—we are not making this up—we saw—promise, we are not making this up: One blog. One. Just one. One. And—to make matters worse—it was date-stamped. From about two years ago. Oh-my-goodness. Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect searching for a web designer. You Google. You find this designer’s site. And you check it out, just as we did. And, out of curiosity, you decide to catch up on their latest thought leadership and/or musings. And you see one sole blog, time-stamped from two years ago. Quick: What’s your reaction? You got it: Are they still in business??? Our reaction precisely. Whoever you are, reading this article, do not repeat this suicidal mistake. Do not project to the world—and to your prospects, for goodness’ sake—that you, once, two years ago, had an idea, just one, and then went completely brain dead but somehow managed to keep paying your URL hosting fees. It is worse, far worse, than not having any blogs at all. Clearly! Now extrapolate from this story, this extreme example. Could you solve this by having two blogs? One from two years ago, and another from merely one year ago? Of course not. See where this is going? If you’re going to post, then post. And keep at it. But what if you’re not a content machine? That’s entirely possible. Then do this: Create at least, say, a half-dozen entries. And make sure they’re not date-stamped when you post them. Needless to say, make sure that the topics of these articles are evergreen, too; you don’t want to, say, comment on that morning’s big headline from the news. Of course, if you’re a web designer, you may want to show off that you’re good at building, and updating, websites. Starting with your own. Need help with a challenge like this? Or any other? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. We were recently tasked with writing some marketing copy for a B2B client of ours, utilizing real-life success stories from their client files. The goal, not surprisingly, was to lure other prospects into becoming clients, too, when they read about these great successes.
This is so straightforward that it’s boring. Right? Nope. It warrants an entire article. Who wants what? Granted, we need to cloak this story in anonymity—just as we’d needed to cloak this assignment in anonymity. We couldn’t tell the world, for example, that our client’s specific client suffered from broken systems, couldn’t serve their customers, and so on. Similarly, you don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on the technical side. And herein lies the gist of this story, and its lesson. Let’s get specific. For our client’s client—the one in the success story—they’d used Systems A, B, and C to do their work. They had problems with Systems A, B, and C, which our client helped them solve. So we could have been very specific, in calling out Systems A, B, and C by name, even when we never mentioned who-the-client-was, by name. That would have been accurate. It wouldn’t have gotten anyone into trouble. And, on the surface, it seemed to be the thrust of this assignment. But you’ve got to take a customer-back approach here. (Yes, you can make a drinking game out of how many times we say “customer-back approach” here at Copel Communications.) Here’s the rub: The goal here, if you really look at it, is not to explain how the client in the success story succeeded. It’s not? Nope. The goal, rather, is to tell a prospective client how they could succeed. Aha. That’s different. Which gets back to Systems A, B, and C. In this world in which our client competes, there’s a lot more than Systems A, B, and C for their clients and their prospects. There are systems which compete with Systems A, B, and C. Put it this way: You don’t want to turn off a prospect just because they’ve opted to use System D. Get it? This gets back to the marketing challenge. It’s subtle, yet important. For this assignment, we didn’t want to call out Systems A, B, and C by name… but rather by function. We wanted to create blanket terms for them, for the exact reason of not alienating a prospect who uses System D. So instead of saying “We helped our client with System A,” we said “We helped our client with their transactional reporting platform” (or whatever). This way, whether you use System A or System D for transactional reporting, you both perceive the value of what the company does. As we’d said, this is a subtle difference—the matter of just a few words here and there—but it really makes the difference between attracting the prospects you want, or having them self-select elsewhere. Remember: This distinction was not spelled out to us in our marching orders. It was incumbent on us to read between the lines, to take that customer-back approach, and do the right thing by our client. Need help with a similar under-the-radar marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! |