It’s like a bucket brigade, really – the path between the marketing communications writer and the finally posted content. The bucket starts out full, but by the time it’s gone through a dozen or so hands, there’s quite a bit missing.

So the client’s marketing manager said, “We have the opportunity to contribute an article to a publication. Our PR firm set it up, and the editors like the pitch. Interview the product manager and write it up.”

The publication had some guidelines for writing, mostly about style rather than mechanics. It offered even fewer about what to expect once the article ran.

So we got to work: interview, drafts, contributor’s bio, images, carefully selected links, approvals, ready. That took about two weeks.

The marketing manager handed the finished copy (~1900 words) off to the PR agency, who passed it to the publication. It ran on the Web the next morning, and the eye is never so able to find problems as just a little after it’s too late.

Fixing problems with your contributed articles

Maybe some of our problems stemmed from working in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, it’s lingua franca for moving copy around during review cycles. Unfortunately, it’s not like HTML, and it’s really not like Drupal or WordPress or Joomla or any of the other content management systems online publications use.

Mostly, though, it’s a few questions we didn’t ask. We’re smarter now, and I want you to be that much smarter as well.

1. Images and sidebar

Problem: We included two images and a sidebar in a text box. Knowing how fussy people get about images, we shipped them as colossal, high-resolution JPEG files and let the publication crunch them down as much as they needed to. The images included captions (Figure 1, Figure 2) and the copy referred to them.

The problem was the sidebar, which the magazine had recommended we include. It supplemented a paragraph near the middle of the article, but the magazine dumped it at the bottom, just before the author bio. It was useless down there, but the moral of the story (which I had forgotten – my bad) is that sidebars don’t get along well with these pages.

Fix: Use a sidebar, but create it as an image near the text you want to emphasize.

2. Links

Problem: We embedded several hyperlinks in the article, mostly to webinars and pages on the client’s site. Not all publications like that, because you’re using their real estate to promote your content. In fact, the author bio contained four links; the publication scrubbed them all on the main page, but allowed them on a separate About the Author page.

Fix: Find out the publication’s policy on hyperlinks. They may have a limit of one link per 500 or so words, and they may have a policy that favors authoritative links (e.g.,  to Wikipedia or Reuters) over linking to your own assets. For that matter, include links to other content in the publication; they’ll probably like that even more than links to Wikipedia. Is there a more sincere form of journalistic flattery?

3. Numbered lists

Problem: It’s hard enough in MS Word to list four numbered items, then enter some non-numbered text, then resume the numbered list. It’s even harder on the Web.

Fix: Don’t clown around with this kind of formatting if your article is destined for the Web. It just annoys the people who have to tear it apart and disrupt the structure of your article. Or, hard-number the items into the text instead of using automatic numbering and list items (<li>).

4. URL

Problem: To the extent that a keyword-rich URL gives your content an SEO boost, it’s a nice thing to hope for. Unfortunately, the CMS assigned the article a lame URL: http://www.sys-con.com/node/2207848. Not much SEO juice from that, and no benefit to the publication, either.

Fix: Ask for a decent link. All they can say is “no.” The CMS should be able to accommodate this.

These four fixes should ensure that more of your water survives the bucket brigade.

What else have you found out about submitting contributed articles to Web publications? It’s a different world from paper-based press, isn’t it?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: mcoughlin

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Have you embedded “Retweet This” in your PDFs? Perhaps you’d better go back and make sure that they’re still working. I’ve had to.

In June 2011, I posted “Embedding a ‘Retweet This’ Inside a PDF,” mostly so that I would remember how to do it.  When I referred to the post last month for a retweet I suggested for a client’s PDF, I found that the link syntax doesn’t work anymore; browsers complain about a reset connection.

Retweet this – The new way

No doubt this will change again, but for now, the way to get this:

is by embedding this:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Hiring a MarComm writer? Ask these 10
questions - http://eepurl.com/ieIv (via @johnwhitepaper)

Of course you know this means that you’ll have to root through any valuable PDFs you’ve published with “Retweet this” links and modify them for the new syntax. Set a flag for them in your content management system or start placing “retweet” in the document properties of the PDF (also known as metadata) so that you’ll know where to find them when Twitter’s API changes again.

Aren’t we all getting too old for this? How have you used “Retweet this” links in your content?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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Marketing managers: If you’re trying to understand content marketing, you need to follow these three sources:

• Marketing Charts – thought-provoking data and useful factoids served up daily
• Content Marketing Institute – most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using valuable content in your marketing
• MarketingProfs - webinars, forums, lessons and list-posts for anybody with the word “marketing” in his/her title

These three FREE resources sometimes converge to give you gems like this:

In other words:

Six reasons you can’t get your content marketing to work

Which of these do you need to fix in your organization?

1. Producing engaging content – 42%

You put content out, but its boring. Nobody comments on it, nobody is quoting or re-using it, it’s not helping you in the search engines, and it’s not moving the sales-needle. Whether it’s blog posts, case studies, white papers, podcasts or video, it’s just not adding up to an engaging story. It probably isn’t valuable (meaning “valuable to your prospects,” not “valuable to you”).

Try this: Have your marketing communication writers write for a real human being, not for a demographic or market segment. And since nobody cares about your products, have them write about your customers’ problems instead.

2. Producing enough content – 20%

How much content is enough? If you’re serious about getting onto the first search engine results page (SERP), you need to put out valuable content with masterful use of relevant keywords about five times per week. Hey, what marketing manager can’t do that, especially with legal reviews of the content?

Try this: Cross-examine yourself. If you land on page one, will you necessarily attract qualified prospects and the kinds of customers you want to have? Or will you attract tire-kickers, time-wasters and people who wannabe you? If you can’t generate enough content to get above the noise in your keyword-space, then generate enough to look credible to prospects who find you through other means. That’s a different “enough,” but it’s an important “enough.”

3. Budget to produce content – 18%

This goes hand in hand with #2. You ask the VP of marketing or engineering for budget to write a white paper, or to hire a marketing writer for a series of case studies or blog posts, and she tells you “no dice.” It happens a lot in a soft economy.

Try this: Find content other people are already producing about you and ride those waves. Here’s the Yelp listing (B2C) for a nearby restaurant with hundreds of reviews; that represents acres of valuable (because user-generated) content that nobody needed budget to create. Here’s the Facebook page (B2B) of Johnson Controls, with a mixture of free content they want and free content they don’t want. They may not have a white paper budget, but they can use this as a starting point for producing content.

4. Lack of executive buy-in – 12%

Yes, some execs still haven’t gotten the memo, or don’t yet consider it dangerous that their competitors are consistently generating valuable content. Content marketing can be a tough sell, especially if you have to justify return on investment (ROI).

Try this: You may not be able to get attention around producing new content, but nobody in his right mind would ignore things – both good and bad – that other people are saying about your products and services. If you can’t sweet-talk your execs with terms like “content marketing,” then shake them up a bit with “reputation management.”

5. Producing a variety of content – 7%

Limited resources, unlimited possibilities: video, podcasts, white papers, case studies, eBooks, newsletter articles, blog posts and more. But especially on a small team, it’s hard to produce every kind of content you want and do it consistently and well. Or, maybe you’re accustomed to just one or two kinds and haven’t tried any others.

Try this: Do a six-month rotation, generating two types of content per shift. At the end of a couple of years, you’ll know which types are the best match for your organization.

6. Budget to license content – 1%

Instead of generating your own content, you decide to shore up your website with somebody else’s content. Or, maybe you want to license a report with independent (favorable) information about your products. That’s not so much “content marketing” as it is “someone-else’s-content marketing.” Fortunately, not many of you face this predicament.

Try this: Build your own brand with your own content instead. And get your customers to rave about you so that you don’t have to pay industry analysts to do it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Toronto History

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How does your organization use case studies? Do you realize how potent a tool they can be in your Content Buffet?

[Quick factoid in case you want to be convinced: Eccolo Media's 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey finds that 68 percent of respondents rated case studies as "very” to “extremely influential” in 2011, as compared to 39 percent of respondents in the 2010 survey (page 8).]

Why do case studies work?

They work because people don’t want to feel alone in taking a chance on your product. Whether you’re selling mixing bowls, gas turbines or a college education, nobody wants to be the first to try your product.

So keep that in mind when your marketing communications writer is creating your case studies. Instead of describing how cool your product is, tell a story in which your prospects can see themselves so that they don’t feel they’re taking a big risk by sending you their check.

Of course, you can’t calm everybody’s nerves with one case study, so organizations with a content marketing strategy create a series of them and give them titles that make it easy for people to find one in which they can see themselves.

What’s in your prospect’s head?

Depending on how your marketing communications writer executes your content marketing strategy, your case studies will trigger one of these thoughts in the brain of your prospect:

1. “These guys have some big customers.” Sometimes you want a case study that drops names. Who can resist that temptation? If you landed the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and made them happy, trumpet that from the rooftops and put that idea into your prospect’s head. Most of the time, though, the namedropping is pretty transparent and it’s wrapped around a frankly rather dull Problem-Solution-Result structure. It’s not pretty, but if you have to get the piece approved by a phalanx of your client’s reviewers, you may need clinical, succinct copy.
2. “This is the same problem I have, and these guys understand it.” If you want to plug the reader right into your socket, show that your customer actually had multiple problems – they always have, somewhere – and that you didn’t stop asking questions when you reached the first one. Explain how you fixed them, in as much detail as you can get away with.
   
3. “If these guys can frim the jim-jams for them, maybe they can frap the krick for us.” For this, you need to drive imagination with a case study that tells a real story, especially a story about an unexpected use of your product. You have to show your readers what your customer accomplished with your product, then put them in the frame of mind to think one step removed. That accelerator was designed for a robot? What if we used it in a history-making tchotchke?

What kind of ideas do your case studies plant in your prospect’s mind? Does it align with your content marketing strategy?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: gurdonark

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Breaking your white paper into these three parts can help you build a campaign around it. Start with your white paper outline.

It was supposed to be a simple, short paper:

We’re looking for 4-6 pages of copy. It’s for a lead generation campaign. It’s about our new line of wireless schmedlapps.

That’s all they knew. I knew a little about schmedlapps myself, so they were comfortable with me. We signed the agreement and scheduled the interview.

The schmedlapp subject matter expert is a senior marketing manager. He briefed us because he knew how he wanted the campaign to go, and because he had enough exposure to customers to understand the audience for the paper. It was a jolly, upbeat interview, resulting in a decent helping of grist for the writing mill.

So I started the white paper outline

as I always do: I reviewed my notes, listened to the recording (you do record your interviews, don’t you?) and began moving bits around into a decent flow. Then, suddenly, I got a wild idea from an Alinean webinar I attended featuring Tom Pisello & Jim Novy.

The webinar was titled “Mapping Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyer’s Journey” and it emphasized three steps on that journey:

1. Discovery
2. Consideration
3. Decision

Ker-ching!

I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with – so I started rearranging the white paper outline into exactly those sections.

1. Discover – Why are Schmedlapps Becoming So Important?
2. Consider – Are Schmedlapps Right for My Organization?
3. Decide – How Do I Make the Case for Schmedlapps in my Department?

Readers crave structure in white papers, and this seemed perfect. Betting on the come, I wound out the 4-6 pages of copy to an outline worth 9-11 pages and submitted it.

Double ker-ching – The client’s reaction

We held a conference call to review the outline – they had given me lamentably few actionable changes in writing – and most of the marketing manager’s comments were run of the mill until he said:

I think we should take this structure and break it out into three separate white papers.

To repeat, I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with, and could result in additional business – so I let the manager continue down that road. He had sold himself on the idea of developing three separate white papers and telling the schmedlapp story over a three-month campaign.

Works for me. And, I didn’t have to convince anybody of anything.

So, we’re full speed ahead in building the discover-consider-decide series of papers. The client understands that this represents a change of scope, which affects the original estimate. It’s a better-rounded series of papers for the client, and new work for me.

Caveat writor

While I think this is a good structure for the schmedlapps story and campaign, I don’t want to encourage marketing communications writers to impose it on every white paper you ever write. There are times where it won’t apply, and even when it does apply, you should not use it for every paper.

Why not?

Because your writing will become formulaic and staid, and your white papers will start to look like those ghastly boring case studies that everybody posts on their website, with the invariable Challenge-Solution-Result flow.

If the only tool you have is Discover-Consider-Decide, you’ll start bending every client’s story to fit.

Keep this in mind as one way to tell the story, but not the only way.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: joguldi

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If you want people to read your content, you have to first open the door and shake them out of their e-torpor. Your opening sentences need to nudge them away from their sleepy existence, toward the chasm of novelty.

Think discomfort.

Think “must make the reader itch a little bit.”

Think “mustn’t restate the obvious.”

Lousy first sentences

• Over the last two decades, we have experienced an unprecedented technology boom.
• Two main objectives exist for any Corporate Real Estate and Facilities (CRE) department.  The first is to demonstrate proficiency in managing service delivery.  The second is to demonstrate ability to implement corporate strategy by solving business issues.
• An idiosyncrasy, if not a frustration of the technology evolution in health care regards the advances in diagnostic technologies exceeding the capabilities, if not the practical realities of existing, related therapies and corrections.
• The increasing demands of machine automation pose a unique challenge to the engineers who are responsible for motion control.

Whoopee. These sentences either say restate the obvious, or they state something of potential interest in a way that’s too hard to read.

Allow me to add that any first sentence that includes “today” or “than ever” – as in “Today’s system administrators are stretched in more directions than ever” – is lousy. In fact, it’s worse than lousy: it’s an insult to your readers’ intelligence.

Decent first sentences

• Literacy education in the poorest schools has often resembled a race between well-intended instruction and mandatory promotion to the next grade.
• In an era of over-the-top energy costs and multi-billion-dollar state budget deficits, would you think that a federal education grant over four years would go very far?
• The truly global company knows there is more to ‘going global’ than opening offices in multiple countries.
• The contact center agent is your ambassador to the customer.
• When you make sound equipment for 60 years, eventually you can design almost anything – even a heat-tolerant microphone that fits into electronic assembly flow like any other component.

These sentences draw the reader a little closer to the edge of discomfort and novelty. They are inching toward the goal of not restating the obvious.

Good first sentences

• For your next translation project, how would you like to get a cost estimate simply by answering 13 quick questions? What could be easier?
• “Better a rough answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong one.” -Anonymous (possibly Lord Kelvin)
• Did you know that browsers are not one-size-fits-all? Did you know that it’s possible – in fact, encouraged – to modify them for better performance on specific chipsets?
• If getting a software application to market is a foot race, then getting mobile applications to market is a foot race among jugglers.
• ‘How can I price my games to get more revenue?’ Every game developer, regardless of platform or application store, wants to know the answer to this question.
• The mobile Web. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

These sentences are novel. They open white papers, case studies and technical articles in ways that try to catch readers off guard.

Readers assume you’re going to bore them. Please don’t.

And the writer is…

Me. (I had “help” on the lousy ones, though.)

Frankly, even the “good” opening sentences could be better. I’m not worried about criticizing them, because I wrote them as best I could for the clients, audiences and situations involved. Not everybody tolerates discomfort and novelty.

Do you have any memorable first sentences? Why are they memorable? Let me know in the comments.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: emdot

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Consider the dance of the review loop. Please.

For you, the marketing manager, the review loop is usually just a speed bump on the road to getting the piece published. You build it into your schedule, you circulate the drafts, you nag the reviewers, but most of the time you don’t stop to think about what’s really going on in a review loop:

You’re making sure that the marketing communications writer heard what you said and captured it correctly.

That’s important, and you’ve got a big stake in it.

Last week, Mark Nichol posted 10 tips for critiquing other people’s writing. I think his list applies more to friends reviewing one another’s work than to the client-vendor relationship, so I’ll supplement his 10 with four more.

1. Don’t be shy. If the writer missed the point, let him know that he missed it. Use a sentence like “You’ve missed the point,” or “This paragraph misses the point.” That’s what happened, so just say it. Then tell him what the point is.
2. Do it in writing, if you can; in a phone call, if you cannot. I vastly prefer written feedback to oral feedback. It means that the reviewer sees that something is wrong and wants to change it, and that she has made the mental effort to put it into words. Real-time, over-the-phone feedback sessions are a pain I endure when it looks like the only way to break a logjam in the schedule and get the project rolling again. They invariably go all over the map, so I record them and take copious notes.
3. Use the words you want to see in print. If a sentence is wrong, change it yourself to more accurate language. Don’t worry about grammar, flow and consistency; the writer will clean it up if need be. This is your chance to pluck out of the writer’s head the incorrect language and replace it with the language you want. It’s easier on the entire process if you use the words you want
4. Change actual text rather inserting comments. Assuming you’re using software like Microsoft Word with change tracking enabled, it’s easy to cross out actual text and write your own. In fact, it’s better than inserting comments, which are not always easy to see.  Writers do better with “Gradual, incremental investmentDollar-cost averaging is more suited to the long-term investor than is market timing…” than with an inserted comment like “This isn’t right. Please fix.”

The review loop is a dance between the marketing manager and the marketing communications writer. The more clearly you express the next steps, the smoother the dance.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Eric Ward

Related posts:

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3. Walk Down Your Marketing Writer’s Content Buffet

It’s rare that I post on the mechanics of content marketing, but I think this entry is overdue.

Last year in Social Media Guide and Social Media Examiner, I read about a way to embed a retweet button inside a PDF. Since much of my content ends up in PDF, it looked like a good value-add for my marketing communications clients, and I began using it liberally.

It involves placing in the PDF (or even in the source document) a hyperlink to Twitter that populates a tweet with the text you want moving around the twittersphere, passively glorifying your content.

For example (and to glorify my client’s content), this link in your PDF:

can yield this:

It’s an easy way to spread your message via social media and introduce a little bit of reader engagement.

I was happy with it, my clients were happy with it, and readers were indeed retweeting the PDFs.

But then…

…something broke.

On a new project last week, I had cloned the same hyperlink that had worked properly all last year, then spent an hour or more fruitlessly trying to get it to populate the What’s Happening field in Twitter. I went back to PDFs I’d created for other clients and tested them: they, too, had stopped working properly.

My neat hack had become a casualty of the New Twitter. In short, the Old Twitter required

/home/?

in the hyperlink for retweet to work. It had also required plus-signs instead of spaces between words. New Twitter doesn’t like those. It took me another hour searching for this information – frankly, I don’t remember where I found it anymore – so I’m summarizing it here for posterity, and so that I remember how to do it.

So, to get this:

enter this hyperlink in your source file (MS Word .docx file, InDesign, FrameMaker, etc.):

http://twitter.com/?status=Mobile developers - Get Qualcomm Web Technologies white papers - http://developer.qualcomm.com/webtech | (via @qdevnet)

Note that some applications will spontaneously replace the spaces with %20, but it does no harm. Note also that this probably won’t work at all for users stuck on Old Twitter; I assume that they’ll be forced to update eventually and that your retweet links will work for the lion’s share of your readers.

Whew. I can retweet again.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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It’s easy to confuse “we need to write a white paper” with “we need to tell more people about us.”

Wise marketing managers are able to discriminate between these needs and keep the chest-pounding out of the white paper. Cooler heads keep in mind that people don’t buy features; they buy benefits.

Eventually, wise marketers can convince those who want to fill white papers with the company’s fabulous technical advances that that kind of material belongs in a brochure or advertisement. That works for a given audience in a given context, but expectations are higher for something you want to call a white paper, so you need to be more subtle.

Still, that only tells you what shouldn’t go into your white paper. What should go into it?

What should and shouldn’t go into a white paper

First, consider a few simple guidelines:

1. It should be easy for me to learn something useful from your white paper.
2. I should be able to see my problem, or my customers’ problem, properly described in your white paper.
3. The structure of your white paper should be obvious to me, so that I can skip any uninteresting part and resume at the next meaty bit.
4. I should feel that I’m drawing my own conclusions from your white paper, instead of drinking your Kool-Aid.
5. When I finish the white paper, I should feel that I could probably trust – or at least not distrust – your organization to help me with my problem.

In general, then, here are some should’s and shouldn’ts about what goes into a white paper:

White papers should contain:

• industry data from reputable sources
• quantifiable trends
• a credible explanation of a real-world problem
• broad strokes about your category of technology or approach to the problem (but don’t describe it as your technology)
• sensible arguments in favor of this technology, weighted heavily toward solving the real-world problem explained earlier

White papers should not contain:

• your opinions about where the industry is headed (call that an industry overview instead)
• details about which competing products have which features across your category (call that a buyer’s guide instead)
• a list of feature-benefit pairs, even if they are customer-oriented  (call that a brochure instead)
• details of a customer engagement or use case (call that a case study instead)
• customer quotations about your company or technology (call that a testimonial instead)

“Am I ready to write now?”

Well, not really. You also need to know what motivates the ideal reader of your white paper. I’ve posted on that in the past and shall surely do so again in the future. The more information about your audience that you can give to your marketing communications writer, the better the resulting white paper.

Keep in mind this post from Jonathan Farrington on negotiating with the four personality types. Marketing managers need to understand these types – drivers, expressives, amiables and analyticals – as much as salespeople do, and publish content that floats everybody’s boat.

It may take more than a single white paper to do that.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: swanksalot

Related posts:

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2. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Innovation White Paper
3. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Revolutionary White Paper

There’s something about spring that prompts marketing managers in technology companies to generate as much content as possible in as little time as possible. The marcomm writer’s workload spikes wildly.

It might have to do with abruptly awaking from the content doldrums of winter, or perhaps with late spring-early summer trade shows, but “these go to eleven” at this time of year. White papers, case studies, blog posts, newsletter articles…marketing managers suddenly want it all.

I’ve posted before about not having much use for writer’s block, and it’s more of a luxury than ever in seasons like this. In fact, posting to a blog becomes a luxury at times like this.

Mind you, there are plenty of lessons to relate with this much volume (just not much time in which to write them all up):

• Always provide an outline for anything longer than 2000 words.
• Write out the summary in your white paper outlines so the reviewers can see that you understand the message they’re trying to convey.
• Funnel all reviews through a single client-side contact.
• Everything takes longer than it takes. And then some.

I once had a former cook as a roommate, and he told me that waitresses sometimes conspire to “sandbag” the cook, by buffering their orders and then suddenly posting large amounts of work at once. Marketing managers aren’t that mischievous, but at this time of year, if feels as though the consumers of their content might be.

Marketing communications writers have reason to wonder.

How’s your spring going?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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2. Walk Down Your Marketing Writer’s Content Buffet