Over the course of my 15+ years writing mostly B2B marketing communications, I have worked on just about every type of writing project there is. Of course, what I am working on tends to change with the times; 15 years ago I was less likely to be writing blogs and web copy, while today I am less likely to be writing direct mail pieces and physical sales letters, since these have almost completely morphed into email marketing.

To satisfy the curious, I thought I would share a list of the projects I have worked on this month.  While not totally representative, it should give the curious a peek into what types of copywriting and design I do.

This month I:

• Finished up a 12 page web copywriting project for a Cloud-based search portal company
• Created the design – in Microsoft Publisher – for a case study I wrote last month for a Cloud services vendor
• Wrote over 100 “ghost blogs” and keyword optimized press releases for various attorneys and law firms across the US
• Finished up several pieces of sales collateral (brochures, solution briefs, sales sheets) for the world’s largest IT company
• Started creating a Power Point Presentation on writing copy for the web, which I will share with the marketing department of a billion-dollar corporation
• Updated a LinkedIn profile and gave some social media tips to a busy executive
• Wrote email newsletters for a law firm, a school supply company, and an internet sales distribution consultant
• Met with a financial services client about creating a website for the firm’s new direction
• Began updating a series of product manuals for a company that manufactures clean-air monitoring devices for materials processing plants worldwide
• Went to lunch with one of the greatest professional copywriters of all time, Peter Bowerman, who was kind enough to meet some of his fellow professional copywriters for lunch one day during his vacation
• Completed a few blog posts for www.savvyb2bmarketing.com, a marcom blog I started with 5 other professional marketers about a year ago.

Some months I do more web copy, other times I am totally immersed in creating a white paper, and still others I crank out sales kits and product sheets. But all in all, it was a pretty busy, fairly typical month for me.

If I can help you with a case study, blog, white paper, some web copy, or anything else, please don’t heistate to contact me!

You have created the perfect white paper.  But you can’t drive leads or close sales if your target market doesn’t notice it.

Luckily, grabbing your prospect’s attention is as easy as spending some focused energy on your title. And once you understand the formula, it takes almost no time at all to transform your paper into the sought-after gem it deserves to be.

To understand how important titles are to the success of your white paper, imagine that you have created a white paper about your company’s newest software offering. It is designed for improving throughput in a manufacturing plant. Your preliminary title reads:

 ABC’s new software positively affects throughput for manufacturing plants

So far this title sounds very professional and seems pretty focused. But try to imagine how it sounds to your ideal target. A little self-serving? A little dry? Delving into what your prospect wants to hear can help you craft the titles that will grab their attention.

Step One: Identify the problem

Business executives buy solutions to problems. When creating the title for your white paper, ask yourself “What’s in it for them?”

In our example, it sounds like we have identified the problem: a need for better or faster throughput. But let’s dig a little deeper. What does a manufacturing company get when they have better throughput that they are not getting now? If they can produce more units with the same number of employees, they are lowering their costs and therefore increasing their profit margin. That’s way more exciting than “throughput.”

Step Two: Identify the prospect

No one wants to waste time reading about a solution that is not relevant to them. Again, in our sample title, it seems that we have identified “manufacturing plants” as our target, but we can be even more specific. The IT director is the person who is likely to making the decision on software purchases.

Step Three: Identify the solution

Our solution is a software product. But there are a lot of software products out there. If look closer, we can also identify that it is a user-friendly software product that requires little technical savvy and that it can be implemented in less than a day.

Voila: The perfect title for your perfect paper

Now all you have to do is put it all together:

 A manufacturing IT director’s guide to user-friendly software solutions that can begin increasing profit margins today

Following these three simple steps will help your white papers stand out and help you get more return on your white paper investment.

A marketing copywriter is more of a specialist; this person writes things like sales collateral, web copy, case studies and other specific tools you might use to market to your potential customers.

A marketing copy writer does more than just create polished copy based on your guidelines, he should be able to help guide what you are communicating by asking the right questions (or using your existing creative brief or messaging guidelines) and using fundamental marketing principles to craft persuasive copy that fits in perfectly with your marketing objectives.  

If someone is billing himself as a marketing copywriter, he should have a degree in marketing or several years of experience writing copy for marketing collateral (or both).

A hi-tech marketing copy writer takes that specialization one step further, leveraging deep experience working in hi-tech industries to deliver polished marketing copy about hi-tech or other hard to understand products. A high tech marketing copy writer is primarily a translator - using a broad knowledge of technology to ask the right questions and turn “geek speak” into customer-friendly marketing collateral.

If you work in a hi-tech industry is it necessary to hire a hi-tech marketing copy writer for your marketing collateral? Not necessarily – a talented marketing copy writer can get the job done. But working with someone well-versed in technology who is comfortable dragging saleable product benefits out of engineers can lead to a better end product with less hand-holding and teeth-gnashing along the way. And that’s worth spending the extra time to find the right person for the job.

A little while ago I had the pleasure of attending the Rockstars of Social CRM event in Boston at the Renaissance Marriott, hosted by Chris Brogan and Radian6 (#soccrm on Twitter for those of you who are interested).

Now I am the first to admit that I am a social media newbie, but when it comes to CRM I have a lot of experience from back when “twitter” was something schoolgirls did when you made an off-color remark. But the event last night opened my eyes to some very interesting new ways that social media – and especially Twitter – can help with both offensive marketing and defensive (customer relationship) marketing, including customer service.

In particular, I was interested in what Frank Eliason, Director of Digital Care for Comcast had to say about how they are using Twitter to enhance customer service. He is on twitter as @ComcastCares. He actually reads and responds to tweets but that is kind of old news. Frank takes it a step further. For example, when Fox dropped its feed during a football game awhile back, Frank went straight to Twitter, which was of course lit up with tweets about how Comcast had dropped the game. Frank, having no idea if the problem was with Comcast or not, used Twitter to search for any tweet that had to do with the game blacking out, and discovered that dish users and other cable providers’ customers were having the same problem.

He was able to instantly 1) Realize that the problem was with Fox and not Comcast, 2) let the call center know that the problem was with Fox and not Comcast, 3) Let the field engineers know that the problem was not with Comcast, so they could stop troubleshooting, and 4) Get on Twitter and let his followers know that the problem was with Fox and not Comcast. His followers retweeted and a major customer service fiasco was averted. Pretty cool right?

Now, how is this relevant to B2B?

Monitor the airwaves

There have long been clipping services that will find and aggregate any news mention (TV or print) of your company and send it to you on DVD. www.newsclipsetc.com is one company I am familiar with. You can also set Google to alert you of any mention of your company on the web. For proactive PR and customer service reasons, I hope you are already doing this.

Using Twitter (and especially tweetdeck) makes it way too easy to monitor what is going on with your customers so you can head problems off at the pass. You should always have a search window open with your company name as the search term. Then when someone mentions your product – either in a positive or negative light – you can respond to them directly, with a “thank you” or an offer to help. Can you imagine a better way to surprise and delight your customers – not to mention all their followers who can see what is going on? And if something goes spectacularly wrong, like it did for Frank that day, you can be on top of it long before you would have heard about it through regular channels.

One of my clients, Three Deep Marketing, offers a service where they will monitor all social media for you, and help you design a full-scale social media campaign complete with a dashboard to monitor performance across selected channels. Check them out.

Have you had any experiences using Twitter or other Social Media for improved customer service or to enhance customer relationships? Please share them in the comment section below.

Guy dies and goes to limbo. Devil shows up and says, “Hey this is your lucky day! We’re going to let you choose if you want to go to heaven or hell.” First he shows the guy heaven: a bunch of placid folks in white robes floating about. Then he shows him hell: a raucous party in a hip night club. The guy thinks for a minute, and then picks hell. But when he gets there, it’s fire, brimstone, and eternal torment.  “What happened to the night club?” he wails to the devil. “Oh that?” says the devil, “That was just the marketing brochure.”

Marketing is all about engaging your customers, showing them you feel their pain, and demonstrating that you know how to relieve it. But what happens after the sale? Not your problem? It is if you want to sell anything else to that customer – or to anyone that customer interacts with. After all, we’ve all heard the saying “a happy customer tells one person, and an unhappy one tells anyone who will listen.”

I am talking specifically about customer service here, and it comes to mind because I have had two fantastic customer service experiences in the last few weeks – both of them from the types of companies from whom I have been trained to expect (and put up with) very bad customer service. Both vendors sell me services for my business. Both blew away my expectations and have me totally in the bag as a customer when it comes time to renew my contracts. Who are they? The first was Verizon Wireless, and the second was Fallon Community Health Plan. That’s right. The phone company and an insurance provider.

Waging a Customer Relationship Marketing Campaign

This brings us to the subject of Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM). CRM is a school of marketing founded on the principle that it is easier to sell more stuff to someone who has already purchased from you than it is to go out and get a brand new customer every time. And research has borne out that repeat customers tend to increase the dollar amount of purchases over time, are more likely to buy new products from you with a shorter sales cycle, and will personally recommend you to their colleagues (this is marketing GOLD).

This might seem anathema to marketing professionals. After all, if you stop needing to get new customers, don’t you stop needing marketing?  Au contraire. It takes a really savvy marketer to look at the big picture and develop the plans and programs that keep customers satisfied and keep them coming back. And I’m not talking about cardboard punch cards and free lattes here.

 A few very effective CRM strategies include:

• Making sure your post-purchase service is on a par with your pre-purchase service (read: GOOD customer service – not punting them off to a heavily-scripted call bank in a third-world country)
• Following up with new customers, making sure they are getting what they expected out of their solution, and helping them if they are not (I actually worked with a small company president who personally called all customers within a week of the sale to make sure they were happy with their purchase- Wow. But a quick email can also be very effective.)
• Keeping in touch with past customers to let them know about new products, training opportunities, or webinars
• Asking customers what you could be doing better and following up on their suggestions
• Providing a forum for customers to interact with your experts and other customers to get help and tips

Have you implemented any CRM programs in your business? If so, how effective have they been? We want to know.

Start a blog

Blogging gets people involved with your brand, gives you an opportunity to address customers on a more personal level, and gives some serious kick to your Google search rank. If you have never blogged it may seem intimidating to start one from scratch. Don’t worry, nothing could be easier.  There are nearly unlimited free resources available online for the beginning blogger.

Wage a PR campaign

Press releases have long been recognized as an excellent way to get free exposure for your brand. These days they can also help with your Google search ranking, providing both inbound links and juicy keywords. Make a plan for putting out press releases and stick to it. Once a week is great, but once a month is fine, too. Once you write the press release, you can release it using several online services, for example, PR Log lets you post press releases for free. (http://www.prlog.org/) Put together a list of local and national publications that deal with your industry, and email the story to the editors of those publications as well. Then be sure to post the release in the “news” section of your website.

Get social

Yes, I mean social media – Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and the rest. While it seems like social media has been hyped to death over the last few years, it is still growing as a great way to connect with prospects and customers. Not every social media outlet is going to be right for every company, so do your research and put your heart into the ones that make the most sense for your brand.

A shrinking budget is no excuse to be a shrinking violet; it is simply a call to put more effort into low cost and free lead generation. Who knows, maybe you’ll even stick with it once the economy turns around…

Have any great ideas for cheap and free marketing? Share ‘em here!

Finding your SEO blind spots

There are a couple of sites that offer this service, but the one I use is http://whois.domaintools.com/ . Go there now, and type your web address into the big empty box on the landing page. I’ll wait.

Look at the first section, called “Front Page Information.”  For a sample, I picked Visa USA, just to show you how even a really big company with a lot of money to spend on SEO can miss the “gimmees.”

What to look for

Here we can see that Visa has pretty low scores on relevancy for all of their meta data. What this means is that the search engine matches the websites reported (meta) title, description, and keywords against their actual site content. A poor score alerts the search engines that Visa might be stuffing its meta data to mislead searchers, and negatively affects its rank. I am sure that Visa is not doing that, so we can only assume that their meta data is not up to snuff.

The two other lines we are going to worry about today are the “Links” and the “Images.” Links are how many internal and external links you have in your site. The more of these you have, the better, especially the outbound links. Images are literally the jpegs and gifs that make up your website. Alt-tags describe the picture for your visitors, in case it doesn’t load correctly.

The Fix

Most of these fixes can be done very easily with a simple html editor. You can read a pretty good article about creating and adding your own tags here http://www.fg-a.com/MetaTags.htm.  If you don’t “do” your own website, gather your changes together and send them to your web designer.

Meta Keywords: Visa fell victim to a lot of mistakes in their keyword selection. The first being that they seem to think potential customers are going to type “more people go with visa” or “print advertising” into Google when they want a credit card. The second being keyword overload: trying to fit every conceivable search term into the keywords, instead of focusing on the top six. Once you have the right keywords selected, you will use them to rewrite the meta description and the meta title.

Meta Title: Visa went with their company name and tagline for the title of their website. This is good branding, but not necessarily good SEO. So that the search engine will consider the title more relevant, they have two options. That can either add their name and tagline to the footer of each page, so that the search engine sees the terms being used throughout the site, or they can change the title to reflect their improved site keywords.

Meta Description: This is the text that will show up under your website on an organic search. Visa went with a very conversational sentence here. The problem is that if they don’t repeat many of these words regularly throughout the site, they will get dinged. The easiest fix for this would be to re-write the description to be keyword dense.

Images: Alt-tags are one of the easiest fixes. Click the image (inside the web editor) and select “properties.” The alt-tag box will be empty. Write something in it. Use a keyword if you can. If you are going to do this yourself, consult the help section of your editor for more exact instructions. Otherwise, throw it over the wall to the web designer.

Links: The search engines love links. Internal ones are good, external are even better. Links should be made on keywords whenever possible. For example, “Find out more about Visa credit cards.” Instead of: “Visa offers a wide range of credit cards. Find out more.” Go through your website page by page and look for places where you can link keyword terms to other pages within your site. Also look for places where you can link out to other sites for more information or complementary products and services.

These five fixes won’t guarantee your site will be at the top of the list, but they are the basics that will get you headed in the right direction.

Have any more easy SEO tips? Share them in the comments section!

According to an article in the NY Times, a recent report released by the National Endowment for the Arts  -“Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy” – shows that people are reading more, and not just tweets and texts, either.

The report is based in part on information derived from data gathered by the United States Census Bureauin 2008. The good news for civilization as we know it, is that the percentage of adults who admitted to reading at least one work of fiction in the past twelve months has risen for the first time in nearly thirty years. The greatest gains were made in the 18-24 year old set. This is good news for the publishing industry, which was already struggling when the economic downturn hit last year.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts was quoted as saying that “in a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.” I enjoyed the movie “Idiocracy,” but I am glad that it might not actually happen that way.

What does that mean for us as marketers? Well, when the Millenials become the next generation of C-level execs, they will have the attention span to keep reading white papers, case studies, and all of the other in-depth marketing collateral they need to make good business decisions. MTV who? 

Do you read more now than you used to? Is ten pages still the right length for a white paper? Chime in with a comment!

So what’s the “fail?” Well, it turns out that the website is either under development or having a problem, because when I went to check into pricing, the link didn’t work, and when I went to the contact form there was a message under the form that said (not kidding) “The submit button doesn’t do anything, so stop clicking it.”

Because I was so interested in this product, I actually made the effort to get back in touch with the guy to let him know I was having problems with the website. His response? <crickets chirping>

If you are going to use social networks for marketing, it can’t be a half-baked effort. Taking your prospect half-way down the path and then leaving them hanging is worse than never reaching out to them in the first place. If you are going to foray into social media you need to be prepared to follow-up, follow-through and check your account religiously. Anything else is just a fail.

If you don’t have the resources to support a full-time online community director or some such other fancy new media title, there are plenty of social media freelancers who will lovingly foster your presence in online communities. (I am not one of them, but if you want to get in touch I can send you some contact information.)

Have you had any remarkable marketing experiences with social media? Share them here!

The most well-known option is a marketing agency. A full service agency might have anywhere from 3-30 people on staff and can provide the full range of marketing services from branding to concepting right down to putting the finished product in your hands. Of course, all that overhead has to be recaptured somewhere. That is why agencies command a hefty fee for services, and many will only take on clients with an extended monthly retainer contract.

Now let’s say you just don’t have that much need, or you have a one-time project that will require a lot of heavy lifting and not much after that. Or you don’t want to contribute toward the rent on those fancy downtown offices. There are options out there that can give you just what you need for a lower cost AND with more personalized attention. You can hire freelancers to take care of every aspect of your project from start to finish.

I know what you’re thinking but…

Some common misconceptions abound about freelancers:

It is easier to just hire an agency because they will provide all the services and manage the project with one point of contact.

If you want one-stop service from a freelancer, ask. I personally have a network of freelance marketing and branding strategists, designers, photographers, public relations specialists, social marketing consultants and even a packaging designer and printer that I can coordinate for a completely turnkey project. Most freelancers do.

The agency will have better, more experienced talent.

A lot of agencies keep the core staff to just project managers and outsource all the creative to freelancers. I work for several agencies in this capacity. The only difference between hiring me or the agency is that they tack on a 50-100% premium on my regular hourly fee when they send you the bill.

An agency will be more professional, and more accessible:

Freelancers are running their own one-person business. That means they are heavily invested in their relationship with you and highly motivated to give you the best possible results. Even if you would be a small fish for an agency, you are probably a big fish for your freelancer. My biggest clients are around 300 people. My smallest are around 3. All of them are equally important to the success of my business so I make sure they all get great service and attention.

Have you had any experience hiring freelancers in your business? Or do you currently use a marketing agency?