7-21-08

By Chris Williams
Blue Ferret Communications
chris@blue-ferret.com
www.blue-ferret.com

Most people think copy writing belongs in ads, on brochures, etc. Heavy promotion, chock-full of sales slogans. Oh, and for filling webpages with jargon, so they don’t look empty.

I’ve always believed writing has tremendous power in business. To prove it, here’s one example where good copy helped salvage an entire business!

———————————————-

(Because these proceedings are still going on as of July 2008, I’ve left out or changed names of the parties involved to protect their privacy.)

Last month I received a call from Jeff, a mortgage broker in my area. He said he needed a letter written ASAP, and a fellow copywriter had recommended me.

Why the referral? The letter needed would seek damages from a software company, whose processing application caused severe damage to his business. Heavy on detail, very aware of the seriousness of the issues. Even though I like putting humor in my writing, I am very good at this kind too.

And I’d need to be.

THE PROBLEM: DATA LOSS
I spoke with Jeff at his office the next day. He laid out a day-by-day portrayal of what had happened. This software company - we’ll call them BrokerX Software - had sent Jeff an upgrade of their software 2 weeks prior. Not wanting to risk any data loss, Jeff called the company and had them walk him through setup.

Everything went fine. Until Jeff went back and checked.

BrokerX’s upgrade had erased his database of customer information!

You read right. Every name, phone number, account history…gone. Needless to say, Jeff called back.

At first, BrokerX tried to fix the problem remotely, connecting to his office in California from their center in Texas. While they worked like this (with no success), the software upgrade actually traveled out across his company network and erased any remaining data in the system!

Now the backups were gone too. Jeff almost panicked. He faced a double-barreled shotgun of Business Collapse and Financial Ruin.

Since remote support yielded little, BrokerX brought in technicians from a California office, hoping to restore the data on-site. Over a week’s effort only netted a 15% restoration.

Jeff was crushed. Despite all their efforts, his business was essentially destroyed. All the backups were gone, his paper files only covered a fraction of customers…he faced going out of business. From one software upgrade.

BrokerX declared they would like to settle with Jeff, and requested a damage estimate from him. Here’s where the letter came in. Jeff is a great broker - but he was far too frazzled by these circumstances to write out the story.

THE SOLUTION: AN URGENT LETTER TO SEEK DAMAGES
I was a little busy that week with two other clients. But after hearing Jeff’s story, I knew he needed the help. Badly. Jeff and I met, and had several phone conversations over the course of a week to rush his project along.

This was more of a legal/financial writing project than technical, so it was a unique sort of challenge. But I had several things going for me:

1. Jeff was thorough, and completely open. He provided every detail I asked for, and then some.

2. Jeff’s lawyer stood ready to look over my work once completed. In case a change was needed to
satisfy legal requirements.

3. Because BrokerX had in fact requested a damage estimate, I didn’t have to use a hard sales
angle. I focused on writing out a solid case for Jeff, so his damages would be 100% valid in
any reader’s eyes.

After Jeff gave his seal of approval, his lawyer took a look at it. His response? “There’s nothing I need to change!”

The next Monday, Jeff’s “Request for Damages” letter had been sent off to BrokerX.

THE RESULT: SETTLEMENT IN PROGRESS
Jeff called me a week later to say the company had arranged a meeting to discuss a settlement. He said he finally felt good about the process, and had hope of salvaging his company again. Great! I asked him to keep me informed, and so far everything’s going well for him.

Professional copy writing isn’t just for glitzy ads and hard-driving sales. It’s essential whenever you need to communicate a message. Regardless of whether that message is marketing a new product, explaining your business methods, or requesting legal damages.

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Somewhere around three-quarters of my requested revisions in the past few years were all the same thing. Trading everyday, honest language for a jargon-choked, Corporate-Speak equivalent.

For instance.

MY COPY: Service X uses a unique “credit system” - buy credits for 1-3 cents each. Use one credit per issue (like a stamp). No monthly fees or contracts.

THEIR REVISION: Service X utilizes a proprietary credit-based system, providing the ability to rollout deliverables as a proactive solution at 33-99 per dollar.

I’m a Web writer. My job is to help people with their message. I can’t do that when the message they want confuses the *!#^@ out of their audience.

Which leads me to the title question. Why are businesspeople so scared of using everyday language to sell their products?

I can think of a few possible reasons why they do this. None of which fill me with hope.

1. They’re afraid of standing out. Maybe it’s a holdover from the schoolyard - the kid who stands out gets teased, picked last, and/or ignored. I like being “invisible in the crowd” sometimes too, but in business that just means your clients walk right by!

2. They think corporate-speak is “what people expect to read.” Sure, we may expect it. Doesn’t mean we like it!

3. They’re afraid of getting sued. Sometime in recent history, someone linked the idea of speaking plainly in business to lawsuits from disgruntled customers. Whatever the reason, many corporations started using Corporate-Speak as a sort of shield against liability. If nobody understands what you’re saying, it’s easy to pass the buck. And duck the subpoena.

4. And the deepest, most gripping reason? I think they see how the Web has changed everything. The old walls of business are crumbling. Two people in Texas can now overtake a New York conglomerate online.

So businesspeople hunker down into the patterns they know. Sticking with the language that (they thought) worked in the past.

Or worse, they don’t care about how they communicate at all. They’re big and they’ve got the market–that’s all that matters, right? Who cares about actually understanding the customer, so long as he pays the bill?

Even giants fall. The Corporate-Speak trend WILL have to end eventually. Companies who persist in using it two, three, five years from now? They’re hammering against a whole new consensus. And they’ll suffer for it.

(I’m speaking as a writer AND a consumer here.)

What’s the consensus? We want to know about what we’re being sold. We’re talking about things among ourselves.
And most importantly, we don’t have to continue to do business with you if you treat us like a number.

Have a look at some good writing. I didn’t write any of this copy. Whoever it was did a great job though. I have no trouble finding out what I need to on these sites:
www.webposition.com
http://www.meebo.com/products/
http://twiki.org/

(Disclaimer: I work with a company who uses WebPosition 4 Pro. However, I wasn’t the one who recommended its use.)

Think about the language you use. Realize it does affect your customers. And your company. Which would you rather have: a website full of copy that confuses your audience? Or persuades them?

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Chris Williams
Blue Ferret Communications
June 12, 2006 (originally written)
It’s easy to think of your market as one big block of people. It’s an old print-advertising tactic. It’s also irresponsible to use on the Web.

A customer could be browsing through your site for a dozen reasons. He could be a tire-kicker, just browsing. He could be shopping around. Comparing you to a competitor. Desperate for a fast answer to his problem. He could even be a non-customer - a member of the media, or an industry researcher.

The key to respecting customers’ multiple interest levels is to provide specific types of content geared toward what they want. For these 5 types, the answers to that are:

A. Tire-Kickers

What They Want: The name says it all. Tire-Kickers are merely exploring. They might want to buy sometime in the future, or they may not have any interest beyond the pretty colors. Tire-Kickers are the hardest type to convert to customers, but it doesn’t take much to bump them up a level.

How to Give It To Them: Lure them in with detailed product/service descriptions and clear statements about how they solve specific problems. The Personal Voice (see my report, “3 Web Content Tricks”) is most valuable here, because it can draw Tire-Kickers into becoming Shoppers.

B. Shopping Around

What They Want: Shoppers want clear answers to their questions without having to ask them. They’re out for information, the more prolific and detailed the better. They’re in the emotional stage of beginning to apply reason to justify the emotional want.

How to Give It To Them: Shoppers are easy to please - give them what they want. Information. Put articles on your site about your products and industry. Include success stories. Alternately, you can anticipate their wants through landing pages (several versions of a page with slightly different content aimed at specific questions). Landing pages work best if you’re SEO-savvy and/or use them in part of a larger marketing campaign. They’re more effort, but you’re more specific. Higher return.

C. Comparison Shoppers

What They Want: They want to hear exactly how your product will solve their problem. And how it does so better than your competitors. Unfortunately, if they hear that from you, they’ll be skeptical. Doubly so if you outright mention competitors by name in your content.

How to Give It To Them: Who Comparison Shoppers would like to hear from are your previous customers. Offer them case studies and testimonials from people just like them. The content most likely to sway a Comparison Shopper away from competition also happens to be the most valuable marketing copy available, so use as much as you can get your hands on.

D. The Desperate Customer

What They Want: The Desperate Customer needs assurance he’s in the right place. Right now. He’s stressed. Deadlines loom. He’s already worked out the necessity of buying. All that remains is for you to show him you’re capable of solving his problem. Do that, and you have an instant customer.

How to Give It To Them: Here’s one way to show him what he needs. If you have articles, success stories or newsletters, make sure you have them listed on an index page, sorted by title or publication date, and link to it right off the homepage. Think about it - he can immediately check to see if someone else had his problem. Then he reads the article, sighs in relief, and calls to get that solution.

E. Non-Customers

What They Want: Non-Customers aren’t interested in being sold to, but what you can do is use them to help spread your message. (If you don’t have a clear message, get one fast.) Equip them with information tools. Show them why you’re a great company to work with, and they’ll carry the word along.

How to Give It To Them: They’ll want information, lots of it, and they want it fast. If you anticipate media attention, put a Media Kit section on your site with statistics, article clips, bios, and success stories. (Don’t forget testimonials!) Non-Customers can then get an overall impression of your company in one spot. If researchers come often, consider gathering customer statistics too.

The good thing about Web communication is that you’re not limited to a certain page size or number of words. You can take as long as you need to fully educate your customer and make your sales points. And with the customer types you’re bound to run into (these 5 aren’t all there is, trust me), the more solid content you can put up, the more visitors you’ll convert to customers from it.

(PDF download of this report available here.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Williams (chris@blue-ferret.com) is a Web copy writer in the Bay Area, CA. A true tech-head, he spent 6 years in corporate IT before venturing out in 2002 years ago to help companies communicate more effectively with their customers online. His writing clients include IT consulting firms, union committees, insurance companies, and networking firms. You can find his copywriting website at http://www.blue-ferret.com. He blogs about technology, writing and the communication that occurs between them at http://www.blue-ferret.com/category/blog/

Copyright 2006. This content is free to use and distribute, so long as it remains unaltered. Citation must include the author’s credentials.

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Chris Williams
Blue Ferret Communications
June 14, 2006 (originally written)

If you looked up “necessary evil” in the Small Business Dictionary, I think there’d be a picture of a website. Small business owners are so busy, a website is often placed deep in the “Set it and forget it” category.

Which is too bad, because the content on your website can not only bring you customers, but help you keep them.

Here are 3 ways your website’s content can keep customers coming back to you.

1. Use the Personal Voice - Relationships Can’t Be Built on Corporate-Speak

We’ve all read websites that felt like we were being lectured. Robotic “corporate-speak” is bad enough, but on the Web it’s suicidal. Users have ultimate choice on the Web; talk to them like a corporate drone and they’ll choose to ignore you.

Talk with your customers on your website like I’m doing now. Customers spoken to in a personal voice perceive that they’re being given better service from an actual person. They respond by giving the same kind of loyalty you’d give the Italian restaurant on the corner.

Also, since many other companies use the stiff language of corporate-speak, your personal voice jumps out even more. It cuts through the droning, reminding readers that these are still people they’re doing business with.

2. Respect customers’ interest level-s- (plural)

It’s easy to think of your market as one big block of people. It’s an old print-advertising tactic. It’s also irresponsible to use on the Web.

A customer could be browsing through your site for a dozen reasons. He could be a tire-kicker, just browsing. He could be shopping around. Or comparing you to a competitor. Desperate for a fast answer to his problem. He could even be a non-customer - a member of the media, or an industry researcher.

The key to respecting customers’ multiple interest levels is to provide specific types of content geared toward what they want. Which is:

a. Tire-Kickers - Lure them in with detailed product/service descriptions and clear statements about how they solve specific problems. The Personal Voice is most valuable here, because it can draw Tire-Kickers into becoming Shoppers.

b. Shoppers - They want clear answers to their questions without having to ask them. You can solve this by putting articles on your site about your products and industry. Or, you can anticipate him through landing pages - several versions of a page with slightly different content aimed at specific questions.

c. Comparison Shoppers - They want to hear exactly how your product will solve their problem. Unfortunately, if they hear that from you, they’ll be skeptical. Who they would like to hear from are your previous customers. Offer them case studies and testimonials from people just like them.

d. The Desperate Customer - He needs assurance he’s in the right place. Here’s one way to show him. If you have articles, success stories or newsletters, make sure you have them listed on an index page, sorted by title or publication date, and link to it right off the homepage. Think about it - he can immediately check to see if someone else had his problem. Then he reads the article, sighs in relief, and calls to get that solution.

e. Non-Customers - They’ll want information, lots of it, and they want it fast. If you anticipate media attention, put a Media Kit section on your site with statistics, article clips, bios, and success stories. Non-Customers can get an overall impression of your company in one spot.

3. Give Them ”Scheduled” Reasons to Come Back

If I go to a website four times in a month, and never once see anything new or updated, does it matter how good their products/services are? No, because if I’m the average consumer, I’m very likely to get bored and go somewhere else.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to encourage customers back using regular content updates. You can:

A. Add new articles, as I mentioned before. These articles can talk about various ways to use your services, industry news that your customers would benefit from hearing, and so on.

B. Send a monthly/quarterly newsletter. Which is also an extremely effective self-promotion tool, as several of us can attest to. I think Constant Contact is a good bet here - the pricing’s good and they include several easy-to-use templates.
www.constantcontact.com

C. Put up a blog. Ideal for sharing your expertise and talking one-on-one. Plus, a blog can serve as an entire website with only a few small modifications.

CONCLUSION

Websites were never intended to replace brochures. So how come over two-thirds of small business websites contain less than 20 pages, and are updated maybe twice a year?

Use the Personal Voice. Respect customers’ multiple interest levels. And give visitors scheduled reasons to come back. You instantly move to the top tier in small business website quality.

Any website can use these 3 tricks, from a “set it and forget it” to a corporate-assigned template to your own blog-site. It takes some effort to get into the rhythm of updating your website regularly, but once you do, you’ll see customer numbers going way up.

(PDF Download of this report available here.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Williams (chris@blue-ferret.com) is a Web copy writer in the Bay Area, CA. A true tech-head, he spent 6 years in corporate IT before venturing out in 2002 years ago to help companies communicate more effectively with their customers online. His writing clients include IT consulting firms, union committees, insurance companies, and networking firms. You can find his copywriting website at http://www.blue-ferret.com. He blogs about technology, writing and the communication that occurs between them at http://www.blue-ferret.com/category/blog/

Copyright 2006. This content is free to use and distribute, so long as it remains unaltered. Citation must include the author’s credentials.

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By Chris Williams
Blue Ferret Communications
April 2006 (originally written)

Cue the minor-key pipe organ! Call up those webpages! Put the ‘appalled gasp’ sound effect on standby!

The Blue Ferret has gone mad…MAD, I tell you! Well, okay, just peeved. I see the same thing all over the Web, every day, and it’s bugging me. Dull, unconvincing writing in various formats from companies that should know better. Web writing that falls on its face, that doesn’t sound anywhere near effective. Writing that infects the reader with Mental Yawning Syndrome.

Come along with me. Hear me name the strangeness in writing you’ve seen before, but dared not approach. Observe as I reveal the horror - of Web Writing That Should Not Be!

Type 1 - Leveraging Paradigm Shifts for Redundant Stratagems

Corporate-speak. Go ahead, get the shudder over with. Boring, confusing, stuffed-shirt writing that talks endlessly about seemingly nothing. Does anybody actually read all of that? I used to read technical manuals for fun, but reading corporate-speak is even better than The Scarlet Letter for putting me to sleep. I sometimes wonder if companies who use corporate-speak do so to bore their readers into clicking the Buy Now button.

Type 2 - ME-ME-ME-meeeeeee!

Self-congratulatory writing. Better known as, “We Didn’t Think About What Our Customers Need to Hear” writing. Heavily feature-oriented (this is not in and of itself a bad thing, but ONLY when outnumbered by benefits). Sometimes it goes beyond that and gets into what I call, “I’m So Great, We’re Perfect” mode. That kind of writing does create a mental picture - unfortunately, it’s a mental picture of the company’s CEO prancing around on a sidewalk, laughing at the poor customers he’s so much better than. Very bad for any company’s image.

Type 3 - I’m different, like everyone else

“XYZ Corp. is the best choice for your slimy-monster needs. XYZ Corp. has 18 years of experience delivering slimy monsters to companies like yours.” Says the same thing as the next guy. And the next. Does Xerox handle websites now? How do they intend to differentiate themselves - “We’re number 3,549 to use this exact paragraph. No one else is number 3,549.” ?!?

Type 4 - WALLET! Gimme! Grr, bark, drool

This one grows out of the first three. It’s writing that’s stiff, but aggressive. These companies don’t seem to want to connect with customers. They’re only after sales, the ineffable bottom line. You don’t like it? You’re just a number to them. There are more behind you. Get out of the line. Cold, unfeeling prose that would probably jump out of your monitor and smack you upside the head, if that plugin existed.

Type 5 - More keywords! Higher ranking! Out of my way!

Sites desperate for top SEO rankings. The HTML code on their pages look like badly-formatted dictionaries. The writing on them looks like someone wrote up a list of every possible relevant term, ran it through 8 different language translations, and threw it on their site without bothering to see if it actually made SENSE.

Sites like that are geared strictly toward grabbing traffic through Time-Sensitive SEO, but in a way that’s both hopelessly skewed and borderline illegal. Fortunately, we now have a term for this: Black hat SEO.

Begone, evil writing! (Anybody got any holy water?) All of you, trouble us Web customers no more!

Wait, you say YOU may have some Web Writing That Should Not Be growing on your organization? Quick, lance it!

Strategies for Ridding Yourself of Web Writing That Should Not Be

Three tips, before I crawl back into my crypt (er, I mean, go back to work. Sorry, got too far into character there.):

1. Use Bullfighter. I blogged about Bullfighter the other day, and ever since then I’ve been having a blast subjecting my work to its bull-eyed scrutiny. (The only “bull” it caught in this article was the corporate-speak subhead.) It’s free and simple to use. Cut out the bull before you publish!

2. Call an editor or proofreader. Another set of eyes and a new perspective. It works wonders, honest. There will always be things you’ll miss - plus, if you’ve got one of THESE writing types, they can take your writing away and make it better.

3. Call a writer. Like me! I’m a proofreader, an editor, a writer, AND I use Bullfighter! All in one! Back, evil ineffective writing, BACK I say!

(PDF download of this article available here.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Williams (chris@blue-ferret.com) is a Web copy writer in the Bay Area, CA. A true tech-head, he spent 6 years in corporate IT before venturing out in 2002 years ago to help companies communicate more effectively with their customers online. His writing clients include IT consulting firms, union committees, insurance companies, and networking firms. You can find his copywriting website at http://www.blue-ferret.com. He blogs about technology, writing and the communication that occurs between them at http://www.blue-ferret.com/category/blog/

Copyright 2006. This content is free to use and distribute, so long as it remains unaltered. Citation must include the author’s credentials.

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Why Recycling Brochure Copy Is A Bad Idea for Websites

By Chris Williams
February 15, 2006 (originally written)

“So what do we put on the website?”
“Oh, let’s just toss the brochure copy in there and throw it up on the Web.”

AGH! If only I carried a rolled-up newspaper, and humans were as responsive to nose-hits as dogs. Taking copy from the print medium to the Web should be added to the list of The Seven Deadly Sins of Business. Yet it’s so prevalent that I’ve heard young, finger-on-the-pulse web development professionals spout this nonsense.

So, the Blue Ferret is going to explain why this practice of “dumping” brochure copy onto websites is a very bad idea. Now, there are several more nuanced reasons why this practice doesn’t work, but I’m only going to cover three big ones.

SEO - Bring Them To You

Gone are the days of, “if you build it, they will come.” Websites must now seek out their visitors, like backwards germs. More often these days, this is done through the use of SEO and online advertising. Spiders are called to the site, who plumb its content for keywords and report back to their Googly masters.

The art of keyword insertion in SEO is a tricky one, changing day by day. Using a static, stale chunk of brochure copy someone wrote two years before as the face of your brand-spanking-new website is like trying to dump a Vespa engine into a 57 Chevy.

Part of your website may get indexed, and the rest will sit there, doing nothing, bump-on-a-log style. Effective website content contains relevant keywords, is updated when industries change, and is never left sitting carelessly out in the wind.

Attention Span - Keep Them Interested

Thanks in large part to blitzkrieg media and overnight delivery, we’ve become a nation of impatient people. Sometimes this works in our favor (information access), and sometimes it works against us (rush hour, anyone?). Hand a prospect a brochure, they’ll take anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds going through it. That amount of time allows the reader to skim a bit and determine if the brochure is something they want to keep, read in depth later, and perhaps make a purchase.

What this means is that the company who offers the brochure can relax a little. Brochures are typically given to prospects who’ve displayed some interest, so the initial hook is already thrown. They know they’ve got time to build up interest. They can concentrate on a benefits focus, as I’ll cover a little more in the next section.

On the Web however, viewers have an average attention span of less than ten seconds. I’ve even heard numbers as low as 0.3 seconds spent per homepage visited. That’s a fundamental disconnect with the time people give brochure copy. Website content needs to reach out of the screen, grab the viewer by the eyeballs, and say, “HEY! Stop surfing! What you need is right here!”

Trying to read copy written for a brochure on a website results in one thing and one thing only - boredom. And with billions of websites out there, what kind of reaction will boredom engender? That’s right. Click.

Different Focus - Give Them More

As I said before, a brochure has a benefit focus. One of the core elements in all business writing: talk about what benefits your product/service gives the user. A brochure is a snapshot of your product; there isn’t the space to go into long details about how your company made it, why they decided to do that, and so on. The reader’s looking for how it benefits him, some information about the company making it, and maybe who else uses this product. That’s it. And that’s all the room you’d have on a tri-fold, 8.5×11″ brochure.

A website is multipurpose, but at its core is conveying information to the viewer. There are no space restrictions here. You can put release notes, case studies, schematics, product comparisons, industry standards, testimonials, and (of course) promotional literature all on one site. The important thing to remember is that it all has to interconnect. Benchmark Tests must use the right Specifications. Specifications have to match with Benefits Statements. Benefits Statements have to correlate with Customer Guarantees. You get the picture. Brochure copy is simply too small, too lean to use appropriately on a website.

A brochure could be seen as one aspirin - easy to swallow, simple to digest, with only one purpose. By comparison, a website is an entire shelf of pharmaceuticals, all working together to produce an overall improvement. There’s simply no way brochure copy could be recycled onto a website without severely damaging the website right out of the gate. So don’t do it.

(PDF download of this article available here.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Williams (chris@blue-ferret.com) is a Web copy writer in the Bay Area, CA. A true tech-head, he spent 6 years in corporate IT before venturing out in 2002 years ago to help companies communicate more effectively with their customers online. His writing clients include IT consulting firms, union committees, insurance companies, and networking firms. You can find his copywriting website at http://www.blue-ferret.com. He blogs about technology, writing and the communication that occurs between them at http://www.blue-ferret.com/category/blog/

Copyright 2006. This content is free to use and distribute, so long as it remains unaltered. Citation must include the author’s credentials.

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