Last night I was skimming through a marketing research magazine while waiting for my kids. I joke that if reincarnated I’d like to come back as a market researcher (or gospel singer!) because as a copywriter and consultant, I don’t get to work with numbers. In the marketing world, people like me are usually brought in when the researchers are done. But I wanted to see the articles on name research because as I’m sometimes asked to help come up with company or product names.

It was interesting to read about all of the research that can go into a naming project, but what most struck me was one author’s assertion that the name should to specific to the customer that it sells the product.

What he was saying about customers tied in exactly with my mantra about talking to customers not at them. That applies to naming too! I hadn’t considered that before, but reading his comment gave me a flashback to a few years ago, and it’s such a great example of this, I have to share.

We were asked to help rename a company that copied and delivered legal documents (or something like that, my memory is a little fuzzy). The pain points we were addressing were accuracy and speed, an also a specialization in the legal field. So the name ideas we were coming up with were all meant to tell this story (plus we were doing domain name research at the same time to make sure the URL would be available).

In the end, the graphic design firm that had hired us to do the naming decided to do it themselves. As part of the rebranding of this company, they had come up with a certain color box that all documents would be delivered in. That box would be the company’s brand.

So they decided to rename the company ColorBox. (Not “color,” a specific color, but I don’t want to say.)

Now, if I’m a potential customer and I’m shopping around for someone to do legal document reproduction, how in the heck am I going to know that ColorBox can meet my needs?

It’s a classic example of talking at the customer. “We’re going to have this really hip, cool name, but you won’t be able to figure out what we do based on the name, so you’ll never know that we can meet your needs.”

I guess as a copywriter and marketer I should be glad, because decisions like that simply scream for great copy because at some point someone is going to have to explain what that company provides.

But wouldn’t it have been easier to have a customer friendly name to begin with?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on email marketing and Web 2.0 marketing for small businesses. By small, I mean a wide range from hyper small, like mom-and-pop shops, up to mid-size companies. The reason I’ve been (let’s use a more accurate word here) dwelling on the topic is two-fold:

First off, I see far too many small- to mid-size businesses doing a poor job at email marketing.

Second, I see far too many of these same businesses not taking advantage of Web 2.0 marketing.

In the first case, I blame the ease of email. Email marketing is easy to do, and therefore easy to do wrong. Despite all the talk about segmentation and relevance and one-to-one marketing, most of the calls I get as a copywriter and marketing consultant are from businesses doing batch and blast email. Or they’re not using email at all. Not sure yet which is worse…

Regarding Web 2.0, there’s one incredibly easy way for these businesses to take advantage of Web 2.0 marketing that has nothing to do with podcasting or Facebook or Twitter. And even though it’s easy to do, unlike email marketing, it’s easy to get it right.

I’m talking about blogging for small business. Blogging is one Web 2.0 marketing tool that business owners can put to work right now, today. Seriously, if you’re a small business owner reading this blog, you could be writing your own blog within the next 30 minutes depending on which platform you choose. Ditto for the marketer for the mid-size company reading this blog: your company should be jumping on the blogging bandwagon too.

That said, the whole idea of blogging for business stymies most clients I mention it to. OK, it stymies all of them, I admit it. That’s why I started making up a guide for getting going. It’s still pretty rough right now, although I’ve given it out to a few people, but if you’re thinking about blogging as a marketing tool and you’d like to see it, email me at sharon@weknowwords.com.

If you’re not thinking about blogging as a marketing tool, definitely email me at sharon@weknowwords.combecause we need to talk!

Delight them. Repeatedly…

I was commiserating with a client shackled by management, prevented from implementing certain marketing initiatives because of an emphasis on direct, measurable ROI. I’m a proponent of indirect marketing (maybe the only proponent) by which I mean marketing efforts that have an impact that can’t be directly measured…which led to a story a client told a story about a great Mexican restaurant by his work.

He had been telling coworkers about the place because it’s clean, the staff is friendly, they remember your favorites, and the food is good. In essence, he is marketing on behalf of the restaurant by telling people about it, what we call word-of-mouth or viral marketing.

But this viral marketing isn’t the result of some concerted effort on the part of a marketing department to incent people to talk about them. It’s incidental.

The restaurant didn’t manipulate my client or entice him in any way to say great things. They simply provided a superior, consistent customer experience and a tasty meal.

No marketing budget has a category for “delight” and I’d probably get nowhere trying to convince a director of marketing that cleanliness, quality and friendliness should be part of her marketing plan, because she wouldn’t be able to track the ROI of a smile.

But would a carefully crafted ad generate the same kind of incidental marketing that the restaurant is now benefitting from?

My corporate and personal taxes are finally done, yay! Thanks, Rick!! And I now have two bills to pay, one for each. Rick is a doll and keeps his costs down for me, but still his rate is $200/hour and he’s worth every penny because I know my taxes will be done right. I’m paying for his time and knowledge, but also his experience…which is hard to price at all!

As I work through my divorce, I am paying my lawyer $175/hour. (Don’t tell the lawyer what the accountant is charging or else his rate will go up to match it!) As my “ex” and I navigate the complications of a “dissolution of marriage” in the county we live in, where people with kids jump through lots of hoops to get divorced, I know my lawyer’s also worth his hourly rate. He knows the system, and he knows how to work with couples who have lots of difficult discussions to work through. Again, I’m paying for time and knowledge, but also 20+ years of experience as a family law attorney.

And that’s what copywriters sell: their time and their knowledge, but ultimately their experience. In a word, their expertise. And the more experienced and knowledgeable the copywriter, the higher the hourly rate should be, whether you’re paying her for email marketing or Web writing, a case study or an online press release.

About half the time we are asked for a copywriting estimate, we don’t get the job because the prospect doesn’t want to pay the price. (Note: We’d prefer to know the budget upfront so we can just tell the prospect what we can do within that budget, but somewhere it is written that budgets are to be guessed at, not disclosed! Silly people.) For me, it’s a filter. If someone doesn’t recognize the value in what we’re selling, I don’t want to do business with them anyway. Every freelance copywriter I’ve ever talked to agrees it’s the clients spending the least money who take up the most time!!

For those businesses who choose to scrimp on the copywriter, and plenty do, the results are typically less than stellar: email newsletters that don’t deliver, Web sites that don’t convert, direct mail goes directly into the recycle bin. That’s because you get what you pay for.

Just like my accountant, lawyer and saddle are all worth the money they cost, so is a great copywriter.

Earlier this week while in a Tully’s coffee shop, I saw a display for a drawing that is both clever in how it engages with customers and clever in helping to grow Tully’s in-house email marketing list.

The entry forms ask you to enter your “super-long” coffee order. You know, like the ones you overhear the pretentious people say while you’re waiting in line: “I’ll have a Venti skinny mocha with half soy, one packet of sweet ‘n low, at 170 degrees, with 2 tablespoons of whip.”

You make up a long order (and there’s plenty of room to go all out with it!), and Pemco Insurance donates a dollar to Children’s Hospital for each entry. That’s neat! That’s a feel good! You’re also entered into a weekly drawing for a Tully’s gift card. So it’s self-serving too. You get to help a charity and help yourself. Plus you have fun making up the absurd order.

Then at the bottom you enter your email and below that is a check box to sign up for Tully’s email club, to “receive the latest Tully’s news and coupons.”

By the time you get to the bottom of that form, you’re feeling pretty good about this whole deal. And besides, you’ve just given them your email address so you can be notified if you win. Why wouldn’t you just go ahead and check that little box to sign up?

Compare that to just a “sign up for specials” box on a Web site. I bet this converts much better. And I’m pretty sure growing their in-house email marketing list is the point of this contest! Although it’s so subtle, the customer doesn’t see that.

Very well done. I love it.

Thanks to my annoying friend Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware, I finally saw the light about blogging back in July. He had been after me for two years to blog, but it wasn’t until I got the whole search engine optimization part of it that it made sense to me to do so. I stopped writing my email newsletter and started blogging instead. (Side note: I have recently decided to do both because they are different mediums and I like delivery my copywriting message both ways. Email me at sharon@weknowwords.com if you want to get the newsletter, I’m aiming for a June start.)

Once I started blogging though, I found myself going back and forth between blogging for SEO and blogging as a means of putting useful, relevant information out into the world. The latter is always my primary goal, to further my cause of convincing marketers to talk to customers not at them, but then I want people to find the blog too, so they get the message which leads me back to keywords and SEO and…can you see where I’m going with this?

It has been like a flip flop, until I finally realized that it was no different than writing Web copy for a client. When the copywriters at We Know Words take on a Web writing project, we first write the copy regardless of the keywords so we can master the tone, message, voice, length, etc. Then after the client and the copywriter are both happy, we go back and optimize the text using keywords. (We also get more natural sounding Web writing that way. I can usually tell when a Web page was written with keywords and SEO top of mind.

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve definitely seen how it can help one win search wars. (See other blog posts on “soap is dumb.”) But to really create a win win for all, the blogger’s challenge is to find the balance between the search and the reader.

My daughter’s class will be taking a field trip to JA Biztown next month, a facility sponsored by Junior Achievement that gives kids the chance to work, earn, spend and save as part of a mini community for half a day. It’s an amazing setup. They’ll have checking accounts and paychecks. They’re assigned jobs like CEO, CFO, sales manager, and mayor. One team puts together a newspaper that day, another runs the TV station where kids broadcast commercials for their micro businesses. Each little business (i.e. group of kids) has to start the day with a business loan, then determine how they’re pricing their products to make sure they’ll earn a profit by the end of the day. They buy insurance and lease their storefronts; they pay utility bills and buy supplies. It’s incredible.

I’ll be one of the volunteers helping out with management of about 150 kids that day. When I went to the volunteer training, I got a sneak peek at the place. Wow.

It’s amazing to walk into this huge room that is the tiny city, with miniaturized versions of Washington Mutual, Home Depot, Ikea, and other big companies. As a parent, I was touched that all of these businesses are part of this unique educational effort, donating money and resources with no immediate return on investment.

As a marketer, I was struck with the brilliance of these businesses that donated something else too: their brand. But here’s where they see the long-term benefit of their participation. By being part of JA Biztown, Washington Mutual, for example, is planting the idea of WaMu as bank into kids’ minds. When they’re older and opening that first checking account, they’ll think of Washington Mutual without even knowing why.

I was telling another mother about this and she said in a slightly disgusted voice, “But isn’t that brainwashing?” Probably yes. Maybe all marketing is at some level an attempt to brainwash.

But more important is foresight, cultivating future customers, making a short-term investment now for a payoff down the road. Companies often don’t want to invest in indirect marketing like email newsletters, blogs, and other activities that aren’t immediately measurable but ultimately impactful. Too bad. Maybe those marketers should spend a day at JA Biztown for insight into what these other companies are doing. Hey, with 150 kids, at the very least we might need a few more volunteers.

As a copywriter, I had to laugh when I read the following comment in Email Insider yesterday:

“44% of marketers surveyed believe the biggest challenge in email is providing relevant content. - eMarketer (2006)”

That’s hilarious to me because any copywriter worth her salt can serve up relevant content on a daily basis. Really what these marketers are probably saying is they don’t know how to not talk about their products or services. Relevant content means simply information that’s useful to the recipient, not a sales pitch.

Take the email newsletter as an example: I’ve yet to sit down with anyone thinking about doing an email newsletter and been at a loss when we started talking topics and articles. Quite the opposite! My brain typically goes into overdrive.

Maybe it’s my magazine editor background, maybe it’s because I’m a writer, or maybe it’s because I’m not stuck in the company mindset meaning I can think like a customer: What would be interesting to me, the customer, not you, the marketer?

And this should be true of any copywriter.

So if you’re a marketer who thinks “relevant content” is a challenge, I challenge you to bring in a copywriter who doesn’t eat, drink, breathe it like you do…and relevant content will be a breeze.

A while back, a company called We Know Words looking for a copywriter for an email campaign. I asked a ton of questions, as I always do, and found out this company was sending their email newsletter to a list of 80,000 people who had never requested it. At the same time, they had a list of 1,500 people they’d had contact with in the last two years, and a list of 500 from the past six months, but they weren’t doing anything with either of those lists.

Pop quiz!!!

Which list should that company focus on?

a)    The 80,000 people who don’t even want to get their newsletter

b)    The 1,500 from within past two years

c)     The 500 from within past six months

If you answered c or both b and c, good job!

But they didn’t want to, because all they can see is the numbers. Yes, 80,000, that’s a lotta prospects, baby! In real life, however, they’re not prospects, just victims of an overzealous email marketing effort. The smaller lists were the prospects, they were the people who had raised their hands and said “tell me more.” And they were ignored.

It’s a mentality I run into a lot: Companies choose quantity over quality when marketing. “Better to market to thousands who’ve never heard of us than concentrate on the few who actually expressed an interest!” And we wonder why direct mail averages a 1½ % return rate.

I was telling this story to my friend Jim Rosemary of New Tech Web, and he put it so well: Marketing to the masses is just that, mass marketing. Marketing to a specific audience is direct marketing.

Mass marketing vs. direct marketing. How many marketing managers know the difference? Not just in how they’re marketing but in how they’re impacting their potential ROI?

The biggest irony here is the job title of the person I spoke with: Manager of Direct Marketing. Sigh…

Yesterday was about being authentic, Today is about the follow through. Marketing is a promise. If you don’t deliver on that promise, you might have a customer the first time around, but then you’ll lose them forever. As I just discussed with a colleague over lunch: It’s easier to keep a customer than it is to try and win one back.

Once you’ve discovered what makes you authentic, make sure your company is following through. It’s like when I went to Ireland over 20 years ago and was delightfully surprised to discover that it was everything I had imagined it would be. All the mental images I had of Ireland (think marketing) became real. The real deal lived up to the expectations, the promise of what Ireland would be like.

That’s what our marketing should continue to do: first, to be authentic, to paint a picture in the customer’s mind of what their experience will be when they buy from us. And second, to deliver on that promise.

I confess I’ve been remiss about blogging. My head has been full of other things, and the blog fell by the wayside for a while.

So last week I was talking to a cowboy, bemoaning my lack of blogging. He said, “Blog about me!” He was kidding, but I looked at him and realized he was a great inspiration for a blog about marketing because he’s so darn authentic. He is who he is, he doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He’d rather talk about horses and cows than any other topic. He wears his cowboy boots to a swanky downtown dance club in the city. He cruises around in his big old truck with pride. In a word, he is real. And that’s refreshing.

Authenticity is in short supply in our society. As a result, a grotesque amount of boring, generic, corporate sounding copy dominates the marketing landscape. And it all starts to sound the same…

It’s not the bland, generic stuff that grabs the consumer’s attention, however. These poor folks are marketed at all day every day and they stop noticing. In our crowded and cluttered world, it’s the renegade approach of Jones Soda, the viral effect of Nivea’s “soap is dumb” campaign, the innovation of Apple ads that get noticed.

So be willing to be authentic. If you look, act, talk, market like your competitors, then you’re simply one of the many. When you figure out and emphasize your differences, you stand out. There is no many, only you.

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about marketing and dating, here’s another argument for being more targeted in your marketing, in this case, with your direct mail…

Time and again we copywriters run into clients who choose the quantity over quality approach to marketing via direct mail. They’d rather spend the same money to send out a lot of boring, likely-to-be-tossed-right-away direct mail pieces than to spend the same amount of money on far fewer but much more impactful pieces.

It’s like shooting a bunch of arrows into the sky hoping one will hit a target vs. taking careful aim with one arrow and shooting straight at the target.

If you can spend $25 a pop to create, produce and mail a killer package to 100 C level executives that are your ideal prospects, for a total cost of $2500, why would you instead choose to spend that same amount of money to mail a plain postcard (OK, maybe it’s over-sized) to 1250 people who either won’t notice or even get the postcard? Seems silly, but that’s the route so many marketers take, I guess reasoning they are getting more bang for their marketing bucks because they are spending less per piece…

I ran into this with a copywriting client a few years ago who confessed that winning one customer from a direct mail campaign would equal $15,000 a month in revenue. But that company was unwilling to page for a campaign that would have cost just $1,500 because the cost per package was so high ($15), never mind that it was so targeted and likely to get noticed too.

If—after reading this blog post--you’re rethinking your quantity over quality approach to direct mail and seek inspirational, unique ideas, I highly recommend “Design for Response: Creative direct marketing that works” by Leslie H. Sherr and David J. Katz. I just got a copy and love it so much, I’m keeping it on my coffee table for now.

Newly single, I find myself the recipient of much dating advice. Imagine my surprise and delight last week as one of my clients turned friends turned my marketing advice back on me as dating advice! It’s such a great analogy, I’m using it here…to make the marketing point once again.

Over lunch I was lectured on casting too wide a net, and told to be more selective and targeted in my dating efforts. Just like I tell clients to be with their marketing efforts. If you market in a generic way to a general audience, you’re a lot less likely to connect with a perfect prospect because your message is watered down and doesn’t speak to anyone in particular. If you market to a narrowly defined, targeted group, your message can be very specific to their needs and pain points and you’re a lot more likely to make that connection.

Think of your marketing like dating: Do you want to do Match.com and hear from all kinds of potential suitors who don’t interest you at all? Or do you want to be strategic and meet people you have something in common with? (Not sure yet fulfills that means in the online dating world; I’ll keep you posted.)

Quality is better than quantity, in marketing and dating both.

A common problem I’ve seen ever since I started Web writing is people getting stuck on keywords. That’s because clients have a hard time thinking of the keywords in terms of the words their prospects use when searching online.

Clients want to use descriptive words, words drawn from their marketing collateral. They lean towards the words they use when thinking and talking about their product or service. Either that or they want to use really big, broad keywords that won’t get them anywhere in Google.

Here’s an easy way to change your frame of reference when beginning to brainstorm keywords: Think pain points and problem solving.

Consider your prospects’ mindset when they are searching. Your prospects are online using Google or Yahoo or some other search engine because they have a problem. It might be that they want Indian food for dinner. The pain is lack of knowledge because they want samosas and abu gobi, but they don’t know where to find a local Indian restaurant. They can solve the problem if they can find a restaurant close by. Your site will get found if you use keywords like Indian restaurant, Kent, WA 98032 or East Hill Indian food, etc. (the idea is to be geographical because that’s how they’re thinking).

It might be that they are troubleshooting their business intelligence (BI) software. The pain is the software isn’t working the way they want, and they are trying to solve the problem by looking for technical answers online. You can get found if you use keywords around troubleshooting, maybe mention specific problems…and when they land at your site, you can start selling them on YOUR BI software as better than the one they’re having problems with.

I have found lately that I spend so much time thinking about SEO and keywords and Web writing that I’m losing touch with how most marketers think about search engine optimization but I hope this brief blog helps!

In the March issue of Deliver magazine, I read an interesting article on big businesses marketing to small ones.

Funny, I’ve been so focused lately thinking about small businesses being found online and the growth in numbers of people using search engines to try and find local businesses, that I didn’t even think about the small business owner searching online for products and services that they might want to buy from the bigger guys. And sure enough, one of the pieces of advice in the article is to be found online, meaning big businesses have to follow the same practices as small businesses marketing on the Internet. Search engine optimization using relevant, keyword-rich, updated content!

No matter the size of your company, search engine optimization is where it’s at because search engines are where your customers look. Make sure your SEO writing gets you found.

The more I encourage small businesses and large to consider blogging as anotner marketing tool, the more I realize people don’t realize what makes an appropriate blog topic. Just today I spoke with someone who planned to use their new blog to talk about their business in a self-promoting way. Uh, no.

Your blog, should you choose to blog, should be like your email newsletter: relevant and useful, not blatantly promotional. Also like an email newsletter, it should help to promote your brand, but in an indirect way (what I fondly refer to as indirect marketing).

To market with blogs, don’t write about your business, but write around it. If you own an Indian restaurant, write about Indian food, culture, why your ingredients are homemade, the history of different dishes, how to pair dishes in a meal, etc. Educate and inform, but don’t promote. If, however, you have added a new menu item or you have a special event coming up at your restaurant, by all means promote it in your blog. But by then you’ve developed a relationship with readers and earned their trust and they’ll know that even if the information is about your Indian restaurant specifically, it’s still relevant and useful.

P.S. When I first wrote about “indirect marketing” back in April, 2005, searching for that term in Google got you only 6,950 results. Today, not quite three years later, you get 23,200 results. The term is catching on!! As is the idea, I hope!

And this will be a short one, lots going on! Check out the email marketing survey results from Datran Media. Lots to think about here as companies continue recognize the value in email marketing. So email marketing is good for business, obviously, but that means small business too, and that’s not reflected in this survey. Why does email marketing for small business make sense? Because it lets small business owners and marketers build a voice and relationship in a way that other marketing channels can’t, other than blogging. See the survey at www.datranmediasurvey.com.

My head is swimming with blog topics this week, all around email. First I went to the StrongMail email marketing conference Monday morning, then yesterday downloaded a fantastic report from MarketingSherpa on common email newsletter mistakes. So bear with me, but there are so many topics to take on…and so many seem like they’d be no brainers but I see our copywriting clients make email mistakes all the time.

Heavy on my mind right now is how many times marketers forget to make use of their non marketing emails. For example, I’ show the Welcome email can be the most often read email. So after someone subscribes to your email newsletter, for example, you’d send them a welcome email. But are you using it to reinforce your voice and brand? To remind them of all the benefits they’re going to get as a subscriber? To confirm for them that they made a smart choice when they handed over their email address? Or is your welcome email (if you’re using one, and you should be) generic and dry and dull?

Another missed opportunity is the transactional email. For example, yesterday I posted a press release (about our upcoming talk on online press releases) at PR Web, and received just a straightforward, boring confirmation that thanks me twice and has the order details in it:

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for your recent order of $80.00 with PRWeb.

Order Summary

Invoice/Tracking Number: xxxxxxxxx

Date Paid: February 05, 2008

Payment type: Credit Card (Visa)

Paid to: PRWeb

Order Details:

- PRWeb Press Release - $80.00

Order Total: $80.00

Again, thank you for your order.

Sincerely,

PRWeb Staff

Excuse me, but that’s it? I just spent 80 bucks on this, and yeah, I want a receipt, but how about something more? Something like:

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for entrusting your news to one of the Internet’s most popular press release distribution sites. After the release date (noted below), be sure to keep an eye on the useful metrics so you can track how well your press release is doing. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at ….

Then give me the order details. (And can we just outlaw the word "sincerely"? There are so many other wonderful ways to sign off!)

That’s not so hard, is it? To be a bit human and to reinforce their marketing message?

Last night I heard an NPR piece about a publishing company called Twelve that only publishes 12 books a year . Six of their 9 books so far have become best sellers. Jonathan Karp, the man behind Twelve, explained that by only publishing one book per month (in a world that publishes 33 books every hour of every day of the year), they can really focus on an author and his or her book, to edit it, shape it, and publicize it.

Earlier that day, I attended an email marketing conference in Seattle put on by StrongMail. According to analyst Julie Katz of Forrester, the first presenter, 77% of consumers say they get too many email offers and promos. And 72% delete the emails without reading them. Why? In my opinion, it’s the publishing equivalent of 33 books published every hour: Marketers just keep sending out emails, believing quantity will win out over quality, which leads to lots of duds and only a few best sellers.

Consumer trust of email has gone down dramatically as a result. And that’s bad for everyone.

There’s a lesson here for marketers: If you target more selectively and send to fewer people—those more likely to respond--your response rates will go up and your boss will be happier with you.

And your copywriter can do a better job. No matter how well written your email marketing is, no matter how hard your copywriter tries, if you’re sending out too many emails to too many people who don’t care, all your copywriter’s hard work is simply being deleted.

Go to www.strongmail.com to download the Jupiter Research report “The Maturation of Email."

In February, Marina and I will give a presentation on using online press releases to promote your business on the Internet.

For too many marketers, especially small businesses struggling with Internet marketing, online press releases are a missed opportunity. That’s because too often the term “press release” makes marketers think of a boring piece of paper mailed to journalists who don’t really care.

Our goal with this talk is to get people familiar with the new world of online press releases and how to use them to market your business on the Internet, both by building credibility with an online press room, and using press releases for SEO (search engine optimization).

Of course not everyone can come to Kent, WA, to hear the talk. So check out the article Marina wrote for those who can’t make it. Titled “Market your business on the Internet with online press releases and a press room,” the article offers nine tips for building and benefiting from an online press room.

If you are one of the few marketing souls or small business owners who can make it to Kent on February 21, see details about our presentation “Using Press Releases to Promote Your Business on the Internet.”