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:

1. absorb information from topic experts
2. suggest in print how the topic should be explained (a.k.a. write a draft)
3. 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.

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

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1. Your Marketing Writer Takes One Final Look

When you hire a marketing communications writer, her responsibilities should include a final, pre-publication look at the piece, just before the train leaves the station. Your responsibilities should should include giving her that opportunity.

Marketing writers don’t write; they suggest. You don’t need to apologize for changes you make to drafts, but you owe it to yourself to give your copy – once it has traveled the long and winding road to final format – to your writer for a final scan.

One writer did a rush job for us last week, hammering very rough copy into a product datasheet, FAQ and sales teaser. She also added a lot of good content and figured out how to make the pieces tell our story, much better than it had occurred to us to do.

All of the copy ran the gantlet here, and everybody had revisions to make. A couple of the sales and marketing managers had misgivings about running it past the writer one last time before we sent the pieces to print – “What if her nose gets out of joint over the changes we’ve made?” – but I argued that it would be silly not to let her go over them. “What’s a marketing communications writer for?” I asked rhetorically.

I sent her PDFs with our revisions on Wednesday afternoon, and she had returned embedded comments – don’t forget you need more than just the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to make those – by Thursday morning. Among the things she noted:

• Two sentences with missing words – Somebody was writing too fast.
• Two occurrences of “Best-in-class” in adjoining paragraphs – This was a qualifier we had added. She pointed out, “This phrase adds nothing, and may even detract from the technical value of the piece.”
• Three clunky sentences that she re-plumbed to make more sense.
• A hail of phone numbers in our company information box – “People who have this datasheet in their hand will need just one big, fat toll-free number.”
• Disclaimer language for mentioning other companies’ trademarks – Without a phalanx of lawyers poring over ever sentence we publish, we sometimes forget about fine points like this.

She told me it took her less than a half-hour to review and make comments: thirty minutes our marketing communications writer invested in making us look good. She also mentioned that she always offers her clients a pre-publication review of content, even for projects on which she has not worked.

“Most clients don’t take me up on it,” she noted. “I don’t know why not.”

Do you give your writer this opportunity? You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t.

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Don’t Go Well but Result in a Good White Paper

These are like the basketball games in which you make mistakes, bad passes and poor shots, but you win anyway, mostly in spite of yourself. Warning signs:

• Creeping Review Loop – If it takes you too long to obtain, vet and summarize comments from your reviewers and get the changes back to the writer, you can burn out a lot of people on a project like this. Some conscientious managers worry about taxing the writer’s patience, but that’s the last thing I worry about. The more people you pull into the review loop, the clunkier and less focused the paper can become; then you start to tax the patience of the interviewees, subject matter experts, graphics team, designers and execs through whose inboxes the paper moves over and over.
• Creeping Scope – In a similar situation, the original scope may become obscured by newly suggested topics we want the paper to address. Beware of this if you envision a “thought-leadership” paper, because the project will attract lots of new thoughts in which we want to be considered as leaders. I had one of these projects that went on for six months as execs added more content to it. The result is a splendid paper, but it’s too long. The download numbers have been good, but I doubt that anybody is really reading it.
• Ego – Nobody wants to touch this one with a 10-foot pole, but everybody knows it’s there. Sometimes there’s too much of it, especially when an exec commissions a paper, has Marketing hire a writer, makes life difficult for the writer and the manager, then guts the paper and rebuilds it because the message is wrong. Sometimes it’s the writer’s ego that gets in the way. You can get a good paper out of this, but the process is painful for everybody.
• Deference – If you’re going to have multiple managers involved on a white paper project, somebody needs to be the designated driver. On one project, I had two product managers so concerned about peaceful collaboration that the writer never got clear direction because neither PM wanted to offend the other by taking a stand. The writer was a good sport about it – and was getting paid to keep up with our tergiversation – but we all learned the lesson about too many cooks in the kitchen.

Still, at least you get something out of these projects. I’ll post shortly on the other category, projects that don’t go well and result in a bad white paper (or none at all).

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1. A White Paper Project That Went Well

This is not uncommon (you should pardon the double negative). Most engineers don’t understand that the role of Marketing is to initiate the conversation as a result of which their products will be sold, so when they see a marketing manager coming, they assume we’re there to organize the next company party. They often have trouble giving us the benefit of the doubt when it comes to translating their technology into the plausible, persuasive story that is a white paper. They often prefer either to write it themselves when they get enough time or not to cooperate at all.

So, what would you do in Matilda’s place?

Anticipating the tension, Matilda wisely announced that she was going to offer three levels of service:

1. Full service: Writer interviews engineer, collects data, and writes/illustrates entire paper.
2. Revision Service: Engineer prepares draft of white paper, turns over to writer. Writer updates design and copy, adds or cleans up illustrations.
3. Third Party Review: Engineer prepares white paper in entirety, then submits for specific suggestions from experienced writer.

(We’ve worked at level 1.5 also, in which the engineer prepares an outline with the salient points to be covered in the paper, then the writer fleshes out the outline with interviews, illustrations and other materials.)

That was Matilda’s concession to the engineers. Her concession to the writer is that she planned for this to be an ongoing relationship, in which she offered a relatively steady stream of work at these different levels.

Did this work? We don’t know yet, because it was too nuanced to fly immediately, and it wasn’t the one-way-or-the-other solution that makes decisions easy for upper management. Still, I like it as a compromise, whether you’re a marketing manager trying to harvest content or a writer pitching your skills.

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