Set your marketing communications writers up to give you perfect content. Have them write about what they love (that you sell).

With Valentine’s Day still on our minds, it’s a good time to think about love, as in loving what you write about.

Tom Chandler of the Copywriter Underground posted recently on Tom Gaylord, an authority on airguns. Gaylord loves the subject of airguns so much that he could write all day and all night about them, and he does just that. Chandler writes:

The first words out of Gaylord’s mouth were: ‘Most important is to write about the things you love doing.

‘I see my role as more an educator than salesman,’ he said, and his straightforward style of writing reflects it. He’s been writing about airguns for almost two decades, and expects to ‘continue doing so until I drop.’

‘You should write about the things you love so much that you can’t wait to write the next post or article.’

Do you like that concept? What would you have to do to surround yourself with freelance writers who love writing about your products and services?

Getting Your Writer to Love Writing for You

In surveys of employees, education and training are often among the most valued perquisites. What if your freelance writer, on the other hand, values something completely different?

Like relationship.

Consider these ways to relate to your marketing communications writer:

1. “Horses for courses” – Give your writer the kind of work you know that she likes and at which you know she excels, and keep bringing her back to it. When you first engaged her, you certainly asked, “What kind of writing have you done before?” Did it occur to you to ask, “What kind of writing do you like to do?”
2. Treat her like an insider – “We have a marketing strategy meeting coming up next Monday afternoon, and I’d like you to join us.” How difficult is it for you to arrange that? The sooner you get beyond treating your writer like your auto mechanic, the sooner she can do more than check your fluids and change your oil. Don’t forget that your writer is halfway between you and your audience, and a professional writer will pick up valuable things you’ve overlooked.
3. Personal rapport – How many kids does your writer have? Where is she going on vacation? What’s her favorite cuisine? How is her day going? A lot of people don’t have the personality to ask questions like this, but it’s how relationships are built. You know these details about some of the people in your life; why not about your writer? The writer who knows that her relationship to you is important, is the one who can love writing for you.

Of course, writers are in it for the money, but when that’s all they’re in it for, you can usually detect it in their work product. When you as a marketing manager engage your writer in a relationship, the writer is inclined to fill that work product with more of herself. You win, the writer wins and your content wins.

These are extensions of some of the ways you can help your writer over the hump. When she’s completely on your side and loves writing for you, you’ve got a big-time ally.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sis/ / CC BY 2.0

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When you meet marketing communications writers in networking situations, here are 5 useful questions for qualifying them.

Believe it or not, freelance marketing writers do get out in the wild from time to time, where, if you’re shopping for writers, you can hire them.

You may encounter them at chamber of commerce meetings, industry get-togethers and networking mixers for your profession. Note that they don’t frequent the same venues as most technical writers or even copywriters. Some of them fancy themselves closer to the people whose custom they seek than to their colleagues and peers.

Still, they all want work, and they may even want it from you. Here’s a sequence of questions you can pose to determine whether to short-list the writer who approaches you in the wild:

1. “What do you write?” This is the first hurdle. Regardless of his industry or specialty, you want to know what kind of content the marketing communications writer generates. If you’re a product manager or an engineer who needs a white paper, and the answer comes back “direct mail copy and press releases,” this is a bit of a stretch. Or, if you need a grant written, and the answer is “case studies and LinkedIn profiles,” you’d better keep looking.
2. “Are you freelance?” Don’t forget that many agencies and companies have their own in-house staff of writing talent. There are freelancers who work for agencies, and that’s not an obstacle to your hiring them, but if they work as employees anywhere, they won’t likely have time to dedicate to your projects when push comes to shove.
3. “Do you have a card?” Asking for a card is just an expression of interest, not a tacit commitment to hire. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but I recommend you judge a writer by her card. A serious writer has a serious card. If it’s flimsy, or it reads “vistaprint.com” on the back, then you’re probably holding the card of an unsuccessful or fledgling writer. Maybe that’s all your budget can support, but know what you’re getting into. If she says, “I have a résumé,” that is NOT a business card; it means this person has not yet decided to make a living of freelance writing, and you should not yet decide to hire her. If she says, “I don’t have any cards with me,” then she’s an engineer – they never carry business cards with them (or are hopelessly stingy about giving them out).
4. “Do you have a Website or a blog?” A blog is the easiest thing in the world to put up nowadays; a small Website is the second-easiest. This question is another way of gauging the seriousness of the writer. If your needs will tolerate a good writer who is clueless about visibility on the Web – are there any left? – then don’t worry about the answer to this question. Otherwise, visit the site with measured expectations; it’s not going to look like disney.com, but it should satisfy your basic curiosity.
5. “Where can I see your writing samples and clients?” Frankly, hoisting lots of writing samples onto a site is rather laborious, so you may have to content yourself with e-mail attachments. Once I hired a writer who had NO electronic samples – he mailed me an envelope of printouts – but I needed his subject matter expertise. Note that there is a bad reason for having no writing samples: The writer is just getting started or is dabbling. Note also that there are good reasons for having no samples: The clients have so “enhanced” the writer’s work with typographical and other errors that the writer no longer feels any ownership, or the writer has written pieces which the client has not released externally.

In short, most real marketing communication writers have:

• a card with an address on it
• a phone that isn’t the house phone
• a Web site or a blog with occasional updates
• examples of their work
• a client list

In addition, most really professional marketing communication writers have:

• a compelling piece on why you should hire them
• a social media presence (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, etc.) that demonstrates a following
• endorsements from clients

The kind of writer with which you want to do business DOES NOT have:

• excuses for any of these things

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Sure, this is all work for hire, and a freelance writer won’t have the dedication to your company that a full-time employee will, but what’s wrong with asking for a little commitment?

The Marketing Writer’s Commitment to You

If you’re structuring the engagement correctly, you as the marketing manager commit to paying and the writer commits to delivering the content you want. That’s not very complex, and each of you knows where the other stands.

But, it’s really only a transaction.

Don’t you want a relationship? Don’t you want a marketing writer who’s visiting places you don’t go and sending you back ideas? Don’t you want a writer who sees your overall content landscape and writes from that background?

Suppose your writer asked you to put him on your newsletter mailing list. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

Suppose your writer followed you in other channels – videos, webinars, tweets, press releases – and sent you a list of new content ideas with a note:

I’m not just angling for more work, but here are some opportunities for new content that we can jump on. What do you think?

What can you do to get that kind of commitment?

Ask.

Your Commitment to the Marketing Writer

Once you’ve determined that you and the writer get along, and that he’s willing to learn about your business and do better work for you, bring him in closer. Try these:

1. “I’m going to send you a sample of our product (or a guest login to our Website, or a free hour of our service).” Offer to pay for an hour or two of his time to learn your product or service better, so that he builds context and background around the terms he uses in his pieces for you.
2. “I’ll have our Web marketing team send you our latest basket of keywords.” This is so drop-dead simple – it helps your writer give you more-searchable content – but it’s a big leap for a marketing manager to think of it. Plant the relaxed, high expectation that he will do the necessary research to use the keywords properly.
3. “I’d like you to dial in to our weekly marketing meetings for the next couple of months.” Even if he’s just a fly on the wall, he’s going to pour things through important filters and come back with ideas that have not occurred to you. Ask him for them after a few calls.
4. “I’ll put you on our mailing list so you can see the kind of content we’re generating all the time.” No writer interested in a strong relationship with you will consider that spam. He doesn’t need to cling to every word, but he ought at least to find patterns or opportunities. Or maybe just typo’s.
5. “We’re sending you a plane ticket so you can work on the next paper on site for a few days.” Some writers will say they’re too busy to do this, and you may have to punt, but having your freelance writer in house for a few days will shift a lot of relationship-building into high gear.

What have you tried to bring your marketing writer in closer? Has it worked?

photo credit: Vinay Shivakumar

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Didn’t Go Well and Resulted in a Bad White Paper (or None at All)

These situations are frustrating for everybody, and it’s hard to control the resulting damage. Warning signs:

• Wrong writer – Sometimes it’s a bad fit between your company and the writer you’ve hired. Good writers can write about a lot of different things, but it takes a good businessperson to say, “I can’t write that kind of paper,” and not all writers are good businesspeople. Maybe you made a bad pick, or the writer was foisted on you by somebody higher in the food chain. You should cut your losses and either start over with a new writer, or greatly limit the scope of the paper to the writer’s comfort zone just to get usable content. Otherwise, you end up with nothing usable.
• Review Loop Gone Astray – Ever have a paper land in an inbox and never come out? Say you send it to an exec and don’t get an answer; how often do you want to pester him/her before giving up? Still, you don’t want to be responsible for publishing it without sign-off, so after a while you interpret the lack of response as tacit disapproval of the draft. If you can’t get a straight answer out of the reviewer, take your licks, pay the writer for work done to date, and move on.
• The Writer is Driving – It’s not a good sign when the writer becomes the champion: the only force moving the project forward. You can pay writers to do that, but prepare for disappointment, because most of them don’t know how to do it, and few of them can reach into your company and pester people for interviews, meetings or review comments. Very small companies may need to go this route, but larger ones rightfully pay marketing managers to run these projects.

These projects don’t go well because the process is messed up. Beyond the process of writing the paper comes publishing the paper, which can also disappoint you for a variety of other reasons I’ll explain shortly.

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I’ve come across this several times since hearing Renato Beninatto of Common Sense Advisory pronounce it at a localization conference several years ago. It’s an important piece of information for writers who approach me peddling their services.

Web 2.0 pundits drone on about giving us, your prospects, value, whether we’re ready to buy or not, and it makes good marketing sense, but how do you implement the sales sense so that we prospects who like to buy, don’t feel as though you writers are selling to us?

How about you, Mr. or Ms. Writer? Are you going to type or dial?

I couldn’t turn this notion into a book, but it’s worth a blog posting: I believe that the jobs are in the phone. The real jobs, I mean.

They’re not on the Web, they’re not in the classifieds, they’re not on Elance/Monster/LinkedIn/Twitter, and they’re not in e-mail. They’re in the phone.

Put yourself in my shoes. You like to buy but don’t like to be sold to, right? Let’s say that, if a writer has the moxy and self-confidence to phone you and introduce themselves there’s a 10% chance that you’ll buy from him or her.

Now rate that contact against writers who introduced themselves to you by other means on the same day:

1. E-mail – Would you rather buy from somebody who sent you unsolicited e-mail, even if it looked as though s/he knew something about your company?
2. Direct mail – Here are writers casting fate to the wind and the US Postal Service. Would you rather buy from them?
3. Online marketplaces – You’re making a cattle call, trying to find a writer for $10/hour. You’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff and hope you’ve made the right choice among people who are crouched behind their firewall, waiting to see whether a fish bites (pardon the mixed metaphor). Would you rather buy from them?
4. Personal recommendation – A colleague walks into your office and says, “Are you still looking for a writer? I used to work with a really good one, and I can have him get in touch with you.” Would you rather buy from that writer?

I can’t speak for everybody, but I would rate #1-3 far below the 10% chance of hiring somebody who phoned. I’d probably rate #4 at 20%, but that’s the only thing that would trump a live caller — with me, at least.

Let me ask again: Are you going to type or dial?

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She wrote:

“I’m just now in the marketing phase of my freelance copywriting business. How can I get past the ‘no experience and small portfolio’ problem to even get people to call me? I need to get hired to get experience, but no one will hire me because I have no experience.”

I’ve seen a lot of writers go through this – for that matter, I went through it, though I didn’t let it slow me down – and I always feel like Patton, smacking the soldier who was worried about losing the war. I went for a walk around the block to calm down, then I replied:

“Under the circumstances, you should assume that no prospects will call you spontaneously (but you should be happily surprised if they do) and that YOU will have to go to prospects, either by cold calling or attending industry events or other avenues of contact. You should also put together a small Web site, but don’t sink big money into it, and don’t expect that the whole world will suddenly visit it.

“When you find the person who needs content, one of his/her first questions will be, ‘Can you show me some samples?’ That’s where your prior work comes in. Be sure it’s clean, presentable and easily accessible. Do NOT apologize for anything about it; samples are rarely a perfect fit to the prospect’s need, and if that need is great enough, and the prospect likes the way you present yourself, then s/he will decide whether it’s a good fit.”

Of course, there’s a lot I leave out – mostly because it’s up to the happy interaction between what man proposes and what the universe disposes – but this is one of the first steps in getting business. I want to shake a lot of good writers by the lapels and tell them this.

How do writers get your business?

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After about 45 seconds it was obvious to me that this person knew plenty about Web design and maybe a little about Web development, but nothing about freelancing. Arrangements like this are not good candidates for a business relationship. Sometimes the net works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I looked at her (very good) samples during a phone conversation with her, but never did pick up any of the fire in the belly or closer instinct I associate with people who freelance for a living. Sure, every freelancer has a first customer, but even tentative freelancers should convey commitment to prospects.

Look for that commitment in your writer-candidates. If you don’t see it, keep looking.

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