What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager.
A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked,
Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough. So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading.
I’ve mulled that over for a couple of years [...]
“Marketing communications” and “I promise” don’t always fit in the same thought, but they should. Once you make the commitment to your customers, your marketing communications writer can convey it.
There’s nothing more discouraging than a broken promise, and nothing more encouraging than an honored one.
Which one do you want to make to your followers, prospects [...]
At its core, the goal of a marketing effort these days is to create a following and start conversations that include you. Hire a writer who understands how you want to go about it.
My friend and colleague John Bromhead is fond of saying,
Marketing is the process of starting a conversation.
David Meerman Scott is more [...]
People won’t read all the way through your 250-word press release, but they will read your 1000-word story. Can your marketing communications writer deliver a story for you?
Susan Straight, professor of creative writing at University of California at Riverside, posted an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:
Over the years, some people have said to me [...]
Hire a writer who understands that the social media business story is still warming up, and that it consists of several different channels.
How is your business using social media in all its channels? More importantly, how are the people inside your business using them?
I hope you are past the notion that this is all about [...]
“We want to position ourselves as a thought leader,” your boss decides. “We need a white paper that will help set us apart from our competitors so that prospects and existing customers will really want to work with us.”
It starts with The Event. Maybe you’ve undergone an internal transformation, and you now have a secret [...]
Have you ever had too much content? It’s a good problem, isn’t it? Like having too much champagne in the wine cellar, or an infinitely empty stomach at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
What does a Content Buffet look like?
Let’s say you have a recent, huge win:
a landmark new customer
a long-held strategic goal reached on time and under [...]
If you learn nothing else here about hiring a writer, keep this in mind: Projects live and die on how well you communicate to the writer what you want, and on how well the writer demonstrates that he understands you.
But what happens when you don’t know what you want, or when you ask for something [...]
When you’re sitting at the dinner table with your aunt and uncle, and they ask you what you do for a living, how do you explain what it means to work in marketing?
Few people outside of the discipline understand marketing, though most of their perspectives fall into a few buckets:
“Marketing is advertising.” Actually, that’s not [...]
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