marketing
A lesson in clear, succinct copy… from an estate agent
I’m sure I’m not the only one to be inundated with leaflets from local estate agents clamouring to sell my house. And I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning the majority of them to the bin without reading beyond the headline. Especially the one with the headline that read ‘Recent Let’s Agreed’. Sadly, I kid you not.
Anyway, one day last week a leaflet dropped through the letterbox that really broke the mould. It was from the Surbiton office of Hawes & Co and it grabbed my attention immediately.
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Marketing confessions of a shy, retiring copywriter
When I saw Jupiter Jasper Marketing’s blogging competition, http://bit.ly/lpyv7p, I thought I’d give it a go and enter. For one it gives me a topic for a blog post – not always easy to find when you’re busy. And it’s a chance to share some of the things I’ve learnt in business. The topic for the competition is ‘My biggest lesson in marketing so far’, so here’s mine: consistency.
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Why choosing the right words is essential if you want to engage your audience
A lesson in subtlety from World War ll
Writing copy for marketing materials is about much more than describing your business. In my post ‘Let me tell you a story’, I wrote about the power of painting a picture for your audience and the importance of choosing words that will engage them. Well, I’ve just come across a great example from the Second World War of why you need to keep your audience in mind all the time you’re writing.
The Home Publicity Division of The Ministry of Information managed to alienate its target audience with its first poster. Created to boost morale, the poster had the opposite affect because it read:
‘your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us Victory.’ Not surprisingly, it prompted people to wonder who exactly you and we were in that equation!
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Let me tell you a story
I’ve just read a great article in Intelligent Life – The Economist’s quarterly magazine – by Robert Butler an arts and environmentalist blogger.
Basically it’s about getting your message across, and Butler uses environmentalists to make his point. Now, I’ve no idea whether or not this is true but he claims they have a tendency to hit people with stats, results and conclusions.
He says this closes the subject down and doesn’t allow the other person’s mind anywhere to go. His recommendation to Greens is to ditch information overload, “in favour of suggesting details that actually catch people’s interest and allow the other person to get involved.”
It’s good advice that also applies to our marketing materials.
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Think like your customer
Setting up internet banking for an account that’s been open for 18 months proved rather more difficult for my partner, Graham, than he imagined.
I won’t go into everything that went wrong; I want to highlight one thing in particular to show how important it is to be clear and put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. Nowhere is that more important than in our copy. Read the rest of this page »
One hundred million trillion ways to sum up your business
Whatever you’re writing, whether it’s a business letter, web page, newsletter item, or brochure, finding the right words isn’t easy. You have to choose words that clearly and succinctly sum up your business, service or product . And they have to resonate with your audience. But if you think that’s difficult how about this for a fact? There are up to one hundred million trillion ways you could write a 20 word sentence.
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