Walt Kania, Marketing Writer

Promoting the Consulting Practice

What's the best way to talk about your consulting practice?  How do you entice people to call you?  How do you land engagements?

I've been through this exercise with consulting groups several times this  year.

The hard part is explaining exactly where you can help, and what kinds of things clients should hire you for.  It doesn't work to talk in vague abstractions and consultant-speak.

Better to talk about the types of problems you fix, the situations you untangle, the things you actually build.  Talk about burning issues, holy grails.  Offer to take hairballs off their hands.  Paint a picture of what the company gets, in concrete terms. 

In these times, NOBODY will authorize money for assessments, audits, reviews or other . That's foofery for good times. Nowadays, you get paid only for untying knots, bringing in business or saving someone's ass.

Marketing insurance: The brick wall

In all my work in the insurance area, on both the broker side and insurance company side, we always come up against the same gnarly and intractable problem:

The customer experience is abysmal.

Buying insurance is like undergoing a colonoscopy.  Or paying property taxes.

Shoot for magic

Every writer knows about this.

You're going along spinning sentences.  Chugging them out, workmanlike.  The piece is fine and serviceable, and it's saying what you mean.

It's like pedaling a bike. You pump the pedals and you move forward.

But about an hour into it, maybe two hours, if you keep pedaling over the crest of the hill, something happens.

High-velocity copy in a low-key layout: Counterpoint

Working with a client who's in a staid, conservative business.  They're out to change the game, make waves.  Break out of the pack.   They're going with a bold positioning, speaking the unspoken, making a high-velocity promise.

But they absolutely cannot afford to lose credibility or appear shady. 

So we're trying an interesting twist.  We're going with edgy, human, high-energy copy. But in an understated and elegant layout.   Big, big promise in smaller type.

The effect is intriguing.  We'll see how it works.

Sales@yourcompany.com? No, no.

If you must use generic email addresses on your site, make them inviting, low-threat, human.  And create them from the customer's perspective, not yours.

Sales@enterprise.com suggests it's all about your sales department.  Your sales.  Plus, a customer may feel she's only inviting a salesman to pounce.  Not inviting.

Try:  Answers@enterprise.com, Helpteam@enterprise.com, AskUs@enterprise.com, PricingDesk@enterprise.com, Questions@enterprise.com.

Better still, use someone's actual name. 

Trust me

A Nielsen survey reported in Adweek suggested that consumers 'trusted' recommendations from other people more than conventional advertising and marketing.   No surprise there.

"Consumer opinions posted online were trusted by 61 percent of respondents, and brand Web sites by 60 percent. The most trusted form of "advertising": recommendations from other consumers, with 78 percent expressing confidence."

Can you get some of that trust factor into your marketing stuff?  Maybe.  Can you sound a little more like a friend telling you about a product, rather than someone trying to sell it?  Sure?

1.  Skip the hyperbole.  No exclamation points.

2.  Mention a shortcoming or two.  Don't be 110% rosy.

3.  Focus on the experience of using the thing.  What it feels and smells like.  Just like your friend would do. Never mind features/benefits.

4.  Invite customers to try, explore, see, judge, evaluate, rather than tell them what to think.

 

Painstaking revelation

I've been stringing words together since forever, but I just realized this today.
The word painstaking refers to "taking pains."

It's pains taking.

Not pain staking.

Doh.

And I was 20 years old when I discovered there was no such verb as to misle (MY zil), meaning to hoodwink or swindle.

As in the fast-talking salesman misled him.

I now pronounce that as mis- led.

With these admissions I am taking my own advice about building credibility and trust.  I'm pointing out a minor shortcoming, so that when mention I can make your content the envy of the marcom world, it sounds more believable.

Music to write by

Can you write with music playing?   I can't.

I'd love nothing more than to compose sentences about product liability insurance, say, with Bruce Springsteen or Jimmy Buffet playing the background.  But it doesn't work.  I can listen.  Or  I can write.  Not both.  It's like trying to shave with one hand while combing your hair with the other.  I envy my right-brained designer and photographer brethren who can get a day's work done with their iPods on.

It's not just the lyrics that interfere.  Even distinctive instrumentals -- such as a drum solo by Ginger Baker -- are distracting when trying to pick words out of a hat.

But we writers aren't doomed to labor in silence.  There are a few types of music compatible with writing copy.   

 

How to talk about hard drives: Stories or specs?

To me, a hard drive is in the same category as a hot water heater or garage door opener.  You think about it briefly when buying, then never again until it breaks.

It's a classic 'low-involvement' product, as the marketing pundits say.

So how do you talk about them to customers? 

It's interesting to see how Seagate and LaCie approach the issue -- from opposite sides.

The sound of good copy

When writing narration or dialogue for video scripts it's a good idea to read the lines aloud to make sure they will work when spoken.  Lines that look swell on the page don't always sound right.

I sometimes read my print copy aloud, too.  It's easy to spot sentences that are too tangled, too long or just plain ugly that way.

Like that last sentence, for example.

This reads better: "It's a sure way to spot sentences that are too tangled, too long or just plain ugly."