To the pain! (and how it can help you write better copy for your business)

April 19, 2013

Better B2B copywriting

I was helping to write a sales e-mail for a software company recently.

I was also writing a thought leadership article, a PR plan for an executive recruiting firm, and an eZine for pharmaceutical reps. And for each one of these clients, I asked the same question:

“What’s the pain for the audience? Where does it hurt?”

Why pain matters if you want stronger B2B marketing materials

Understanding and targeting emotions is a staple strategy for consumer brands. “Even choosy mother choose JIF” (I know I’m dating myself) markets to moms who have a fears of not being good enough (you’re doing fine, moms, no matter what peanut butter they eat).  Cars promise that you can impress your friends. A beer brand will make you manly and definitely less manly if you don’t drink it (puhleeze).

For B2B, it’s different. You don’t have to manufacture how people will feel using your product (see link to beer commercial video above). You probably have a product or service that actually solves problems, and figuring out what frustrates them, bugs them and keeps them up at night can help you pinpoint specific pains that your company can help ease.

This strategy can really help differentiate you from competitors  too. Most companies are generic. “Our product saves time! And money!” But with a little digging, maybe you can get to what’s really bothering your customers.

For the software company, the marketing manager thought about it and said, “Our customers are IT guys. For a long time they’ve been working with technology that they don’t know how to move away from. It’s expensive and they get bad customer service, but they’re not sure what to do.”

So the marketing manager understood the pain: being stuck, and feeling like you don’t have options.

That’s the kind of pain we’re talking about!

Another example: A pharmaceutical firm wanted to teach reps how to understand the new health insurance regulations starting in 2014. So sure, you could dump all the new laws into a document, but how could you make it more relevant? Right: find the pain.

So the marketing director and I dug in a little, and I had him walk through an actual scenario the reps might experience, like a meeting with an insurer. He said he could imagine that the reps were feeling lost because they didn’t know how the new regulations were going to affect their drug on the new health insurance plans.

So the pain in this case was pretty specific: Feeling lost, and not knowing the right questions to ask.

Using pain for good, not evil

The goal of finding the pain isn’t to make people feel bad about themselves. It’s so you end up with marketing materials that are incredibly relevant to your audience, and that cause change.

For the pharmaceutical piece, it helped create something that was less of an information dump, and more of a practical “how to.”

For the software company, feeling the “pain” of the potential audience contributed to a fun e-mail letter about how hard it was to break up with your old software and go out with someone new.

Do you know where your customers are feeling the most pain?

(PS, and that “To the Pain” graphic is a t-shirt!)

 

 

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Cooking up a thought leadership article that won’t get tossed

July 12, 2012


I’ve been writing more thought leadership articles these days, and for many people, this is a tough task to get started. You want to write something that shows your expertise and that customers will truly value. Here’s a few thoughts on how to begin the process.

First things first: what is a thought leadership article?

A thought leadership article is a piece of writing that positions you and your company as authorities in solving a specific business issue. It can be a short article or blog post, or a longer white paper. Some recent examples:

If you take a quick look at these, you’ll see they aren’t product pitches or a point-of-view on a broad subject. They’re practical. These show current and potential customers that the author of the pieces knows how to solve problems. It boosts customers’ confidence that they’ve chosen the right company to work with. It makes the writer look like they know what they’re doing, and it ups the value of the company in the customers’ eyes.

How are thought leadership articles used?

The average thought leadership article can power a wide range of marketing materials, including:

  • articles to draw people to your website
  • all kinds of presentations — conferences, new business
  • company blog posts or e-newsletter items
  • prospective client handouts
  • published story or opinion piece in trade or consumer media outlets

Five steps to start writing a thought leadership article

  1. Brainstorm your current work. What trends have you been seeing? What kinds of problems have clients been having?
  2. Choose a few issues that are the most relevant to clients, then think more deeply about those. What are the subjects on which you have something unique or relevant to say? Where do you have the most expertise?
  3. Take a step back. Once you’ve determined a few topics, reframe those topics through the lens of your company. What does your company want to emphasize? Where have you identified business opportunities? Maybe you have a great consumer story as a topic or example. If your company targets B2B firms, though, your article won’t help your business.
  4. Demonstrate how you’ve solved the problem.  Use real examples if you can, but if you don’t, it’s OK — but DO use real problems. One client I worked with had a great idea for a thought leadership article — she had a client with a common problem, but the client didn’t have the budget to solve the problem in the best way. So, we presented the client’s problem (anonymously), and then presented the optimal way for the client to solve the problem — not how the client actually did it.
  5. Conclude with action.  Ask a question to get readers thinking. Mention specifically who they can contact to learn more.
How have you used thought leadership articles for your company?

 

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How to Avoid Information Dump Syndrome

May 22, 2012

You know when you’re listening to a presentation and your eyes glaze over?

Or you see a really dense-looking page full of words that you know is supposed to be helpful, but you just can’t bear to slog through it?

It’s not that what you’re seeing needs to be flashier or more entertaining. That would help. But the main issue is that you’ve been a victim of an information dump.

What’s information dump?

An information dump is when a bunch of information is crammed into a presentation, an article, a white paper, or a website. It’s supposed to be helpful — and there’s probably information in there you could use. The problem is, you, as the audience, are forced to slog through it and find those useful nuggets.

If you do slog through it, it’s possible you won’t find what you need, or remember what you saw or read.

Worse, you may not look at the information at all.

Why you need to take a different approach

A different approach will:

  1. Get your audience to pay attention
  2. Get your audience to remember
  3. Get your audience to take action

For most businesses, taking action is the key. Whether you’r hoping to gain new customers or change employee behavior, the fact is you want your audience to do something different after they get your information.

Here’s a how to get started.

Figure out the GOAL of what you’re writing

These are some wishy-washy goals that lead to information dump:

  • Educate/teach my audience
  • Show leadership (OK as a secondary goal, but not a first)

These are better goals:

  • Reduce employee compliance violations by 25%
  • Gain five new clients this year
  • Increase time spent on my website by 50%

Next, pinpoint the behavior you want to change

Now that you’ve got your goals, you need to look at what you want your audience to do differently.

Let’s say you manage several restaurants, and your servers keep getting minor injuries from carrying heavy trays. During employee training, everyone gets a packet about safely loading and carrying trays, but the message isn’t getting through.

You want to change their behavior — the way they load and carry trays.

Or, say you have a firm that does energy efficiency audits. You’ve noticed that a lot of businesses lease office space and later find out that their monthly energy bills are incredibly high.

You want to change your potential clients’ behavior so they perform an energy audit BEFORE they sign a lease.

Make sure to leave some information OUT

Avoid overwhelm by making sure eveything you’re presenting to an audience points to the goal. In both cases above, you might be tempted to give your audience too much information.

It would be easy to give restaurant employees a packet of safety regulations, but you’ve already seen that that isn’t working.

And for energy firm clients, you could give them tons of data about how energy gets wasted in office spaces, but will they care?

Give them what they need, when they need it

Well presented information is USEFUL. It gives you just enough to make your life easier, to save money, and to spark ideas of what you could do better. Ideally, just enough information will start a dialog with your company — you give potential customers just enough to think, “hey, I want to work with this person…I want to know more…”

Start now

If you’re in the middle of writing something, look through it. Does everything

  1. Help achieve your goal?
  2. Change a behavior?

If not, cut it out, and be well on your way to avoiding information dump syndrome.

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Make presentations a million times better with this simple formula

January 23, 2012

A student walked into a classroom and taped up the entire front of the room with plastic sheets.  When the rest of the class came in, she started her presentation by hurling a rotten tomato at the front of the room, where it splattered and disintegrated.  And then she said, “This is what happens when an elderly person gets into a car accident.”

She went on to give a presentation with statistics and backup about why it’s important for elderly people to stop driving when they are no longer physically able.  But the message had already sunk in way before that.  Heck, I didn’t even see the presentation — someone told me about it — and I still remember it!

The Formula: Example First, then Explanation

By nature, I’m a ‘splainer.  I like to explain things first, then give examples.  But I should turn that formula around.  I was writing an e-learning course when the client pointed out to me that I should put my examples first, then definitions and support.

“All the research supports this: when you start with examples, people learn better.”

- Smart PhD in Instructional Design

It’s like the tomato-throwing example: SHOW, then tell.

Writing Better Presentations

Presentation opener before: We have 300 people who work for us with offices in 5 cities.

Presentation opener after: Our clients earned 25% more after working with us last year.

Which one do you think is better?

The “after” of course.  The first one is explaining.  The second is a concrete example.  To get to the example, the presentation writer did the “So what?” test.  She asked: why should a customer care about how many people work here? They’ll care because of how it affects THEM — their money, their time or their happiness.

Another Presentation Tactic: Tell a Story

You don’t necessarily need some fantastic statistic like the one above to develop an example, either.  You can tell a fictional story to make your point.

Here’s an example from an engineering firm:

“This is Joe.  As the building engineer, he’s dealing with an aging HVAC system and a limited budget.  What does he do first?” (then the presentation goes on to follow Joe and how he makes decisions, supported with facts and expertise from the engineering firm).

Making this more of a “real” situation, listeners get involved with Joe’s story, rather than a straight lecture about “Here’s what you need to do first when considering upgrading your HVAC system…”

Why Writing Presentations is Different from Creating Web Content

On the Web, you get about half a second before people leave your page, so it often works to start with a headline, then get into the details.  For a presentation, though, your audience is sitting right there. They can’t leave (unless they’re rude…).  You can take the time to tell a story and get them involved, and as a writer for a Power Point presentation, webinar or e-learning course, you can do this better when you follow the formula:

Example –> Explanation

Have you done this for your presentations?  Has it worked?

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So What?

January 9, 2012

That’s what you ask yourself when you read an ad or marketing copy.  Why else read it?  If the writing is good, you’ll think, “I totally agree!” or “I wish I knew that earlier!” or, best of all, “I need to buy that now!”

That’s why “so what?” is such an important question for writers.

Identifying the “so what?”

I’m writing an in-store video for a new traffic alert service for car navigation systems.  The big point-of-difference is that people get these traffic alerts twice as fast as competitors.  Kind of cool right?

Well, kind of.  Really, though, why should a customer care about that?  What difference will it make in his or her life? Because when you think about it,  what does “twice as fast” really mean?  It’s marketing speak.  ”Best-in-class services!” “Out-of-the-box ideas!” Do these words mean anything to your target audience?

Turning “so what?” into “I totally get that!”

“Twice as fast” only means something if you can relate it to your life and experience.

You can relate to the frustration of getting a traffic alert too late to get off the highway and getting totally stuck.    You can relate to missing a plane.  Or an important meeting.

So instead of the video being about “New system is twice as fast!” and “Look how this technology works!” it’s a narrative about two people, one with the system and one without.  One makes her flight, the other one sits frustrated on the highway.  Everyone knows how that feels.

Two B2B copywriting examples

It  may seem harder harder to find stories that tug at the heartstrings of a B2B audience, but business people have feelings too.  Think about what your audience would love to avoid, or what they wish they had.  Two examples:

1) These ads are aimed at commercial bankers.  They’re for loan review services, which save banks time and money (yawn).  What can the bankers relate to in this process?  How about perpetual stress that they’re not getting their loan reviews done on time, and they’re piling up?  So the ads show how this company can help relieve that stress — something that everyone can understand.

2) These blog posts were written before I was as experienced in SEO, but they do provide another B2B example.  They’re aimed at food product brand managers, and they offer insight into future business trends.  The “so what?” is clear: Here’s what’s happening in the market.  Are you up on the trends?  What is your business doing about it?

The simple proofreading test

If you’re wondering whether your writing passes the “so what?” test,  pretend you’re the target market,  re-read it, and ask these questions:

  • So what?
  • Who cares?
  • What’s in it for me?
They seem like harsh questions, but if your writing doesn’t pass that test, you can fix it.  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and start brainstorming.

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The simple secret to get people to stick around on your site

November 4, 2011

Once you’ve got people to your website, how do you make them stay? Give a clear, concise answer to a problem or promise right at the beginning.  Don’t dance around it. This would be the fancy hotel equivalent of offering guests quick, efficient and courteous service.  And really, it’s just plain polite. That’s what I’ve learned writing for a [...]

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Four tools to help you walk in your customers’ shoes before you write

September 23, 2011

The best kind of marketing writing helps readers solve problems…it says, “how can I help you?”  But what if you’re not quite sure what your customers’ problems are…or what they would dream up if they could describe their ideal product? Some of these answers you know just from being in business.  But here’s a couple [...]

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What Apple can teach you about business writing

August 1, 2011

I love this Apple iPad 2 tv ad.  It’s not only beautiful and emotional, it sells without seeming to sell.  How do they DO that?  What can you learn from this ad that will help you write for your company?  I’m not just talking sales sheets or offer e-mails, I’m talking all the marketing materials [...]

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Where and how to use keywords in website writing

July 19, 2011

If you know your keywords, here are the best places to use them on your website for search engine optimization (SEO). 1) Webpage title.  Each page and blog post on your website needs a unique title which should be 70 characters or less.  Usually, the average reader doesn’t notice the page titles because they’re not displayed [...]

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How to know when your content gets stale

July 5, 2011

I was working on my own website the other day, and I got in touch with a producer to see if he had this old video we worked on together so I could include it on my writing samples page.  In addition to writing business materials and web content, I also write video scripts and [...]

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