The Content Buffet - By John White » process of writing

B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 2)

John White — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:30:37 +0000

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have the story in their heads. White papers help make that story readable, and these questions help build the paper.

Continuing from the previous post on interviews and how to write them up into a white paper, here are 4 more customer interview questions for generating the information readers want to see.

4. What are some current approaches to solving this business problem? Why are they inadequate?

Your readers are already making do, but they’re not very happy with what they have in place because:

it’s a chewing-gum-and-baling-wire hack
it’s too slow/expensive/low-performing
time is not on their side

That’s why they want to read your paper. This is also the opportunity to shake them out of their inertia by pointing out threats you’ve identified that haven’t yet occurred to them; e.g., “If another, less understood scenario of universal health care plays out, providers will also be on the hook for…”

5. Why/how can the approach you’ve chosen overcome these inadequacies?

This information forms the turning point for the paper, as discussion changes from listing problems to solving them. The SME’s time on this question is best spent relating how s/he has seen the approach work in the real world, in a variety of situations. Don’t soak up valuable interview time with a detailed discussion of the approach that already exists in other documentation, slide decks, technical content, etc.

Arm your readers with information and let them draw their own conclusions.

A true white paper will describe the approach rather than your product or service itself, then let readers figure things out on their own. If the paper needs to include a discussion of your product, label it a “technology overview,” “buyer’s guide” or similar. link to rant on mislabeling white papers>.

6. Which particular advantages do they get with your company’s implementation of the approach?

Again, in a true white paper, the goal is not to flog a product, but to build trust and educate. Describing a potential advantage to readers is more proof that you’re in their shoes, thinking of things that have not yet occurred to them.

For example, if the technology you’ve chosen for compressing digital movies also includes the advantage of encrypting them for protection against privacy, mention this in a clinical manner as a potential benefit, without naming it as a feature of your product.

7. Describe a few steps in adopting and integrating this approach in environments familiar to readers.

The white paper is not an implementation guide or a user manual, but this information anticipates the technology questions that will arise at the next level of scrutiny. The people responsible for installing, maintaining and living with the product or service have an itch that the white paper needs to at least begin to scratch, so don’t ignore that itch.

With the answer to this question, you can demonstrate your technical chops to all readers, even those with a business focus. Tell them about replacing the carburetor with fuel injection, but don’t go into which hoses to switch or bolts to loosen.

Once you see how to write customer interview questions that focus on real customer problems, you’ll begin to draw out the kind of information that builds trust with readers.

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: DeepCwind

B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 1)

John White — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:07:18 +0000

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have the story in their heads. White papers make that story readable, and customer interview questions help build the paper.

“We want you to interview our SME, then write up the result into a paper we can use in our content marketing effort,” you say to the marketing communications writer.

Sounds easy enough. But most SMEs don’t think like a writer. They think like a businessman or exec or technologist or financier. And if they simply improvise their way through the interview, the content will suffer for it.

Not all writers understand interviews or how to write them up into a white paper. And not all SMEs give good interview. Send your writer in with concrete customer interview questions designed to tease out the information you need.

7 interview questions

Here (and in the next post) are questions whose answers make a balanced white paper easier to write.

1. Who are your ideal readers for this paper?

The better you understand this, but more readily you can make the jillions of small decisions that will go into the paper: word choice, technical depth, amount of background information to include, hypothetical scenarios and examples to cite. It’s easy to answer this question incorrectly – or to think you know the answer, yet be wrong – and end up with a white paper that misses the mark.

2. What do you want them to do once they’ve read it?

The short answer is, “Move along in the sales funnel,” which can mean a lot of things:

click on a link
pick up the phone and call you for more information
think that you’re cool
pull out their credit card
discuss it with their boss
Tweet/Like/share it

Make your expectation clear in the opening summary; e.g., “This paper will equip readers with a business case for integrating baseball card database management in their own companies.”

3. What keeps these readers awake at night? What are some of the biggest problems they face (that your product/service can solve)?

Readers will devote about 2/73rds of their attention to your product and the other 71/73rds of it to their business problems. If they’re thinking about your product at all, they’re trying to figure out how it would fit in with whatever is causing those problems and envisioning life afterwards. Given that, shouldn’t you write from their perspective?

Information about customer problems is what you and your marketing communications writer need from the SME to demonstrate to readers that you understand their predicament and, in fact, have been dealing with it in lots of variations. When readers see that you you’re thinking more about their problems than you are about your own products, they begin to trust you.

In Part 2, we’ll see customer interview questions that touch on your products, but only obliquely. Remember, nobody really cares about your products. They care about their problems and whether they can trust you to help solve them.

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: eren

That Fatal First Sentence

John White — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:45:50 +0000

Good marketing communications writers nudge readers toward discomfort in the first sentence. It’s too important to waste on lousy copy.

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.

photo credit: emdot

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No Time to Create Great Content? Choose Good Content

John White — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:03:10 +0000

Marketing managers don’t always have the time, writing skills or resources for great content. Don’t wait for the ideal; get something decent out there.

“But I’m not much of a writer,” you moan. “How am I supposed to get a content marketing campaign going without spending a jillion dollars on great content?”

That’s true. Great content isn’t just great content; there’s usually an entire, time-consuming, arduous process wrapped around great content. There has to be, to yield something that you won’t look at in four months and think, “I’m so tired of that paper.” If you’re thinking that, your prospects probably are, too.

Can’t have great? Choose good.

All right, then, make good content the centerpiece of your marketing campaign to start with.

David Meerman Scott (whose work I often coattail) posted last week on how smart people who are poor writers create great content. He offers three ideas, the first two of which are potentially rather expensive, but the third of which almost any marketing manager can do:

Talk your ideas through and then transcribe the results.

It doesn’t take long to build a library of content from this approach. Sure, it’s humble, and it doesn’t tell the story as well as a professional marketing communications writer will, but it gets the ball rolling.

One of my clients in IT service management is building a huge library of case studies similarly. Its own customers are glad to describe in presentations, keynotes, interviews and testimonials their own IT problems and how the product has helped them, and my client records them. We transcribe and edit them, then produce them as case studies that go onto the Website for SEO.

The marketing managers look at each piece and think,

Well, it’s not exactly the messaging we’d use, but it is exactly the way at least some of our customers talk, so it’s good content. It’s a 15% solution.

They know that there’s no such thing as a 100% solution, and even a 30% solution would cost a lot more than twice as much.

Do you let great content become the enemy of good content? Let me know in the comments below.

photo credit: eddiedangerous

How to Give Feedback on Marketing Content

John White — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:28:51 +0000

Give your marketing communications writers feedback they can use. The more useful your input, the shorter the turnaround. And the smoother the dance.

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.

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.
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.
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
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 investment~~Dollar-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.

photo credit: Eric Ward

2 Ways that Writer’s Block Is Your Problem

John White — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:48:09 +0000

Marketing managers depend on copywriters. Writer’s block is the bane of copywriters. What if marketing managers have something to do with writer’s block?

I don’t like to make a lot of writer’s block, or whatever name you want to give to hitting a productivity wall.

It isn’t that I don’t believe in it. It’s more that it doesn’t really help me as a construct. Like the Garden of Eden or the Tooth Fairy, it’s a name for something that I honor in other people’s belief systems but don’t really accept in my own.

So here’s writer Melissa Karnaze posting on writer’s block as your secret weapon, with a six-step guide to unblocking yourself. Use it in good health.

As a marketing manager, do you think you have anything to do with writer’s block in the people who generate your content for you?

Maybe you do.

1. Writer’s block and the audience

While I don’t want to call it writer’s block, there are plenty of times when I’m staring at the blank page or the unfinished paragraph, then staring at the clock, then back at the page.

“Funny,” I think, “I don’t have this problem when I’m writing e-mail to my high school friends.”

“It’s the audience,” I reply. “You know what to write to your friends, and it’s interesting to you and you know that it’s interesting to them. That is not going on here, so you’re stuck.”

Dave Navarro posted a couple of years ago on ending writer’s block forever:

If you put your focus on what your audience wants to read (rather than what you want to write), the whole game changes — and the shift is in your favor.

Professional writers don’t usually call up their clients and moan, “I have writer’s block, and I can’t finish this piece for you.” However, you may get a call that goes, “You know, Claudine, I need to understand the audience for this article better. Can you connect me to somebody who knows the intended reader very well?”

Part of your job in assigning a piece to writers is to tell them what you want written. The other part is to tell them whatever you can about the ideal reader. The folks at Savvy B2B Marketing write extensively about the role of defining the buyer persona in creating content, and they’re right.

2. Writer’s block and the drone

I call it the drone because that’s what how it would sound if I didn’t bust my chops trying to fix it (and succeeding).

The drone arises when you tell the writer to give you six different pieces on the same topic, and about the only difference among them is the channel or medium.

“I need copy on childhood obesity in grades K-8,” you tell the writer. “The audience consists of social workers. I need a 4-page paper, a newsletter feature, a page for the Web site, a print article and a blog post. And I need to link them together so that they reinforce one another.”

You’re asking for writer’s block, because there are only so many ways to say the same thing and have it resonate with the same audience, no matter how much you spread it out. You’ll do better to work with the writer on different angles to the childhood obesity issue.

It’s easier for a good writer to search for and vet different angles on a topic than to try to say the same thing in different – but not too different – ways.

Help your writer avoid writer’s block

Are you surprised that there are things you can do to keep your writer’s pen moving smoothly? Has your writer ever mentioned writer’s block to you?

photo credit: Brian Tomlinson

3 Ways to Help Your Writer Over the Hump

Customer Interviewing – Some Basics

John White — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:46:15 +0000

Interviewing customers for case studies and success stories is the marketing writer’s stock in trade. Some ideas on getting the most out of it.

The case study or customer success story is to your Website what a recommendation is to your LinkedIn profile: an excellent addition to your trophy case.

But it’s a long road from the point at which you, the marketing manager, say “Hey, let’s write up the Schmedlapps account!” to that trophy case, and the first step is the interview.

Criteria for interviewee

First, not everybody wants to reveal that they’re using your product. “We’d love to do a case study with you, Gus,” you’ll hear, “but you guys are our secret weapon. We don’t want our competitors to know how we’re doing so well.”

And many large customers make it difficult to do a proper business-to-business case study, especially for small companies. You’ll have a marketing communications writer author the piece, then you’ll send it over for review, and it will get raked over the coals by your customer’s Legal department. Drag.

For this reason, you should make an ongoing campaign of case studies, so that you have a pipeline of interviews, drafts, approvals and trophies always in motion.

Set up time with Sales and go through the customer database for ripe candidates. Select interviewees using criteria like:

is a current customer
has had a good experience with the product
can talk about technical and business benefits
can talk authoritatively
can talk (this is often overlooked, making for short, fruitless interviews)
is a manager or above

Setting up the customer interview

As interviewer, you’ll only be able to control 50 or at most 51% of the interview; the rest is in the hands of the customer. Prepare well, but also consider that you cannot predict everything.

Have Sales initiate the request. They know the personalities involved and can steer you to the person most likely to give a glowing review of your product. They want to help. Of course, if you go over their head and initiate contact without their knowledge, they’ll consider it a slight.
Once Sales has gotten the customer’s approval for the case study, suggest four different one-hour windows and ask the interviewee to select the most convenient one. Plan on a 45-minute question-and-answer session.
Set up the conference bridge or online meeting and send the details to the interviewee.
Prepare a list of questions and send them to your interviewee ahead of time. He will not likely read them, but you’ve done your part. Ask the questions you need to ask, along with at least 3 great case study questions.

Mechanics of the customer interview

A sufficiently motivated interviewee with a decent story to tell will do most of the work for you. In fact, you may even get in her way with your annoying questions, but as long as you’re getting useful details that your readers will want to learn, you’re still fulfilling your mission. The marketing writer can do the rest.

During the interview:

Mention that the interviewee will see and have the opportunity to approve a draft of the case study. Many people ask about this, so take care of it up front.
Describe the audience and your goals for the piece. This gives the interviewee context and may determine the general direction of your conversation.
Reward good storytelling and juicy details: “This is just what we’re looking for. It’s gratifying to hear such a good story about our product.”
On the other hand, some people aren’t comfortable in an interview. If the interviewee is not inclined to talk much, be frank: “I was hoping to get more details on how your company uses our product. Can you think of somebody else I should talk to instead?”
Try to get a statement of quantifiable benefits. Customers – especially large ones – are usually reluctant to issue them, but it’s worth a shot for the impact they have on the case study. If you can’t get a good, solid statistic, try something like, “Would it be accurate to say that our product shortened your testing cycle from weeks to days?” If the answer is “yes,” turn it into a quote.
Also, be sure to get a clear explanation of how the interviewee did things before using the product and how she does them now that she’s using the product. The before-and-after sequence makes it easier for your readers to follow the story.

Conducting a good interview isn’t the same as writing a robust case study, but it will put you and your marketing writer squarely on the road to it.

photo credit: St0rmz

Tools for Killer Content: Pen and Paper?

John White — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:50:44 +0000

Can handwriting help your content marketing? What if your marketing communications pieces started out in longhand?

Do you write anything in longhand anymore? Does your marketing communications writer?

Could be something to it.

Freelance writer Lexi Rodrigo posted a list of her favorite copywriting tools, among which are pen and paper. She writes:

When you find an example of an excellent piece of copywriting, copy it entirely, word for word, by writing the entire thing by hand.

Don’t ask me how this works, but great copywriters swear by this method, and it’s one way I learned myself. There’s something about the act of handwriting that hard-wires the words into our brains.

That’s pretty novel advice, particularly in an era in which keyboards, touchpads and texting are turning longhand into a dying art.

I know that my brain works differently when I have a pen in my hand – I can feel it – but my handwriting is such an aesthetic affront to me that it gets in the way of creativity. Anything longer than a grocery list just grosses me out.

The best writing I’ve ever done was either in longhand or on a typewriter, a machine halfway between handwriting and a computer keyboard. It’s much more annoying to fix a mistake when using a pen or a typewriter – have you ever noticed how often fast typists hit the backspace key on a computer keyboard? – so I think things through before committing them to paper.

It’s better writing.

Getting help for tibiwangzi

But the problem for us Westerners pales by comparison to the problem for Japanese and Chinese youth. Whereas we need remember how to write only a couple dozen different alphabetic characters, writers in Asia must remember how to compose thousands of pictographic characters.

Recognizing these characters for reading is a completely different matter from pulling them out of your memory and putting them on paper, and tibiwangzi, or “take pen, forget character” afflicts millions of mostly young, mostly electronic-input-oriented Asians. The pervasiveness of this “character amnesia” prompts young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

What would it take for you to resume your childhood use of pen and paper? Would you use it for copying excellent text, as Rodrigo suggests? Can you imagine writing a creative brief or a press release in longhand?

If, as a marketing manager, you discovered that you wrote better in longhand, would it justify the additional time to transcribe your handwritten copy on a computer?

photo credit: Marquette La

Can handwriting help your content marketing? What if your marketing communications pieces started out in longhand?

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3 Questions Marketing Copywriters Should Never Stop Asking

John White — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:53:59 +0000

Marketing communication writers need more than features and benefits to write effectively. Ask these three questions early and often in the writing process.

It takes 21 days to form a habit. Let’s hope it doesn’t take you 21 clients to remember to ask a few important questions at the beginning of each marketing communications writing project.

Who is the audience? This is the most commonly unanswered question in marketing writing. Marketing managers know tacitly whom they want the piece to move, but they rarely emphasize it enough. It’s important to flesh out the answer to this question as exhaustively as the answer to the questions, “What does our product do?” and “How does this service save you time and money?” It’s just as crucial – maybe even more so – for the writer to know what keeps readers up at night and what has their hair on fire.
What do you plan to do with the piece? If this is for the home page or a printed brochure, it had better keep a human reader engaged. If it’s for a deep SEO page that search engines will see more often than humans will, focus more on text that is long on bullets with target keywords and medium on reader engagement. If it’s a PDF for print, then hyperlinks won’t help much, will they? But if it’s a PDF for Web download, then writers can put hyperlinks, Flash video, and social media links in it.
What else do you need me to do for you besides write? There’s more to this question than shameless self-promotion. You know that the longer you’ve been writing and the more you see what you can do for different clients, the greater the value your services can add. The folks at the Content Marketing Institute, most of whom have been writing for a long time, take writing far beyond the pale and advise clients on using writing strategically. Colleague and advertising copywriter John Kuraoka also consults on marketing and branding because his clients have seen that he does much more than take a briefing and send back 250 words for a magazine ad. Not every writer knows how to do these things, and not every client needs them, but they demonstrate how cumulative the writing process can be, and how much information writers accumulate.

Of course, you can ask these questions and get answers and write according to the answers, but you can still hit a snag in mid-paper that sends you back to these questions.

So these are questions that marketing communications writers should never stop asking. I know I never do.

To which questions do you keep coming back?

photo credit: Aplomb

3 Lessons on Cleaning Up Copy

John White — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:28:35 +0000

“Cleaning up” copy is harder and more nebulous than it sounds. When you want your marketing communications writer to go over existing text, keep a few lessons in mind.

Jean, a marketing manager for a new client, sent me a creative brief for some Web copy. As I was finishing the copy, she sent another short paragraph for review.

“I tried to update the existing copy myself,” she explained, “but it doesn’t feel quite right to me. Can you have a look and send me any suggestions?” I agreed and she sent me the copy with her changes.

The original text must have been written by a comatose monk. Jean’s version was an improvement, but it wasn’t as catchy as Web copy could and should be. I started in on it and learned (re-learned, really) Lesson 1.

Lesson 1: Editing is harder than writing from scratch.

This is understandable, but it bears repeating, because many marketing managers lose sight of it. To edit your text, I have to suppress the way it makes sense to me to express the same idea. This is like simultaneously pushing air into a bottle of soda and sealing it with a cap; a single-function machine can do it very well, but most writers are not single-function machines.

So, I decided I’d do Jean one better: I’d clean up the copy she sent me, and then I’d also rewrite it from scratch and let her choose between the two. I know the subject matter well and couldn’t resist the temptation to impress a new client.

Enter Lesson 2.

Lesson 2: No good re-write goes unpunished.

“Why did you rewrite it?” Jean asked me on the phone. “I just wanted you to look at my text and make suggestions.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I cleaned up yours, the way I thought you wanted, then tried a completely different take on it, given what I know.”

“The problem is that there’s a lot you don’t know about this topic,” she said rather sternly. “Besides, there are political strings attached to the original copy, and I have to live with them. I can’t drop a re-write on them as if it were a birthday present. Don’t do this anymore, because it frustrates me.”

This drove home Lesson 3.

Lesson 3: Writers don’t write. They suggest.

Everybody likes options, right? Well, not really.

It takes time and mental energy for marketing managers to weed through options. It’s unlikely they’ll prefer A over B and C just like that; more likely, they’ll prefer A, but can we take a little bit of B and the last point in C and put them into A, then take out the sentence in A that doesn’t fit now, then…

Sometimes the marketing communications writer is a one-stroke wonder, who nails the concept succinctly and delivers copy that yields only a few requests for change. More often, the writer’s job is to:

absorb information from topic experts
suggest in print how the topic should be explained (a.k.a. write a draft)
incorporate seismic changes from the experts

It’s easier for marketing managers to decide how to add, edit or delete when they are dealing with a single draft (or suggestion).

Writers are better off impressing a new client by doing their homework and suggesting something solidly consistent with how they understand the product or service. Launching multiple arrows at the target may seem more artistic or generous, but it burdens the client with an unwanted decision.

It also punishes your hourly average.

photo credit:U.S. Army

Your Marketing Writer Takes One Final Look