Words not plain go mainly down the drain

Golly, there are just so many proud business owners out there.

“We pride ourselves on our bespoke solutions,” these people proclaim. They think outside the box, are  passionate about what they do, and promise to go the extra mile because their business does what it says on the tin. Which is a comfort, because now we can forget the rest and use the best.

It’s National Plain Speaking Day today; an ideal time to think about the advantages of plain, simple language that actually communicates and persuades.

Why do business owners fall back on clichés like ‘passionate’? Possibly because it’s easy. Saying you’re ‘passionate’ means you care. You’re immersed in what you do. You aint just in it for the money. Etc. But what happens when everybody in the whole world is ‘passionate’ about what they do?

Business words only have power if they’re the product of painstaking analysis. ‘Passionate’ unpicked and applied to an individual business can yield meaning and lend persuasive power to a business offering. But it requires strenuous mental effort and a willingness to spend time tracing the business right down to its marketing roots.

Do that though, and you’ll be on the path to bringing prospects in, letting them know in plain and simple language why your services or goods are right for them.

Do you agree?

I wandered lonely as a cow…

…that was Wordsworth’s first draft, apparently. One story has it that when he got home from his muse-filled rambling, the great man showed his notebook to his sister Dorothy, who ‘ummed and erred’ about the ‘cow’ bit. ‘Do cows wander lonely?’ she postured. She suggested a cloud.

That story might be apocryphal but its suits my purpose, so I’m going to believe it’s true. Poets, even geniuses like Wordsworth, don’t just ‘come out with’ brilliant writing. Nor, you’ll not be surprised to hear do copywriters – however well-regarded. As with the great poets, there are 2 processes essential to the copywriting craft: listening and distillation.

Read great poetry, and you’re hearing it too:

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea…” (Coleridge, Kubla Khan)

It’s music, isn’t it? Coleridge must have ‘heard’ this in his head, as he was writing (or before he wrote).

Likewise, great copywriters HEAR their words as they’re composing them. They work with rhythm, assonance, alliteration, metaphor – all the poet’s tricks.

And as with good poets, copywriters work, work and work at reducing their writing down to as pure an essence as possible. Coleridge once defined poetry ‘the best words in the best order’. You might want to argue with that, but I think it’s a handy definition of copywriting. (That’s why I called my business ‘Best Words‘).

So these are things that poets have in common with copywriters. But what else must copwriters do? Don’t send your answers on a postcard – post them here!

You had me, you lost me

Jack and Jill fall down, with readers tumbling after

Did you see today’s half-page newspaper ad from ‘ACT ON CO2′? (This is a cross-government initiative involving 4 UK government departments, aiming to show people how to reduce carbon emissions).

There’s a classic image of Jack and Jill up the hill, not getting any water from the well: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There is none, as extreme weather due to climate change has caused a drought.” Hmm. Not brilliant copy is it? But still, the combination of visual and head copy kind of gets me in. I’m interested, and ready to read the rest, and possibly take action.

But then the copy sermonises about ’serious implications’ for our way of life. A sentence starting: “If we carry on at this rate…” promises impact. But it needs a dramatic second half. Instead, we get: ‘”…life in 25 years could be very different.” Oh dear, oh lor. It’s boring. I’m snoring.

Jack and Jill have, at this point, fallen down, with readers tumbling after.

And what of the call to action? (Advertisers, please read and take note: If you don’t have an effective call to action, you ARE wasting your money). Here’s the call to action of this piece:

“IT’S OUR CHILDREN WHO’LL REALLY PAY THE PRICE
See what you can do: search online for ACT ON CO2″

“See what you can do”. As in, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ As in, ‘don’t try too hard. As and when. In your own time’. Just have a bit of a look on the net, and see.

I did that, out of interest. What a dreadfully uninspiring website it was too. It didn’t exactly say ‘go away and do something more interesting with your time’, but it may as well have.

The Best Words verdict on this campaign: ‘Promising start, but a real dud’.

Do you concur?

http://www.bestwords.co.uk

http://actonco2.direct.gov.uk/actonco2/home.html

Brilliant ‘meerkat’ ads

Hey Mum! Look at this!

Can you really get 10-year olds running to computers to look up car insurance websites?

The ‘compare the meerkat’ TV ad is a brilliant concept and it proves that with the right creative processes, anything’s possible.

The Best Words verdict: ‘It’s a prize-winner’. Do you agree?

http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/

http://www.bestwords.co.uk

Flat tyres ad. Does Bridgestone have money to burn?

Have you seen the new Bridgestone Tyres TV ad?

It’s bad.

This is a TV advertisement which breaks the cardinal rule of benefit-selling. There’s no clear explanation of why we should choose Bridgestone over other brands.  The copy is around 90% ‘we’ and 10% ‘you’. In my opinion Bridgestone have chucked their money away on this ad.

The Best Words verdict: ‘Dreadful. Must do better!’

Fire, rain and the traders’ association

I met old Andy at the stile this morning. He was heading to the wood with his dog, I was heading back. We got into the usual sort of pleasantries about the weather, how he was enjoying the bit of sun etc. I said I was disappointed it hadn’t rained, because I love rain. He chortled a bit,  then went off shaking his head, probably further convinced that I was a bit of  a nut case. He wouldn’t be the first, or the last.

I ambled on, thinking about all those  ’rain’ metaphors: ‘raindrops keep falling on my head’, ‘into each life some rain must fall’ and how rain almost always represents suffering or adversity. From there I went into thoughts about ’silver linings’ and ’singing in the rain’. Fascinating how my mind works, isn’t it? No? Oh, OK. Anyhow, clambering back over the stile on the way back, I  was still on this ’smiling through adversity’ theme, thinking about how our favourite pub/restaurant (The Wellington in Old Welwyn) had just recently burnt down, and what Mark, theWelwyn florist had told me about it.

Mark’s a bit of networking legend around our way, and a classic ’singer in the rain’. When the ‘Wello’ burnt down, they’d had to close the road through the village. You can imagine the disastrous consequences for Mark and all the other shop owners who relied on passing trade. But where others had seen only disaster and more disaster, Mark saw opportunity. Business owners who hadn’t expressed much interest before now started signing up for the Traders’ Association that he’d been trying to start for years.

He presented other ideas too, like ‘Wednesday it’s Welwyn’ where traders offer special attractions and discounts to bring people into the village. I can’t say at this stage if these or other concepts are going to work, but Mark’s attitude is certainly inspirational and I know he’s going to carry others along with him.

I guess if you’re  down and life’s recently dished out a bit of a kicking, it does you no harm at all  to wallow in it all for a while; maybe do a Basil Fawlty and whack your naughty car with a tree branch, but then to know that there are ways out, even if you can’t see them yourself. The rain will clear away, and so on.

But as I said, I’m a bit of a rain-lover. Not the pain and suffering part, obviously. (I’m not like that). Just the actual water coming down from the sky. It makes me feel happy. As does sunshine. But don’t get me started on wind.

Best Words

make your business talk!

The Ashes

Who will win?

Whoever doesn’t have Brett Lee bowling for them. (Oh – that could be either side, now).

Check my thoughts here:

http://audioboo.fm/boos/38450-doug-jenner-s-09-ashes- preview-no-2

http://www.bestwords.co.uk

The colour of Monday

Are you one of those weirdos who see days and numbers as colours? I am.

For me, every day of the week has a colour. Monday is always dark brown, Tuesday light yellow, Wednesday and Sunday orange. Thursday is dark greenish-grey, Friday is black and Saturday white. Just before you start calling for the folks in white coats to come and get me, let me draw your attention to a recent US study which found that as many as 1 in every 2000 people experience ‘cross activation between adjacent areas of the brain’, where something normally processed by one sense is experienced by another.

This is a condition called synaesthesia, and people who have it can ‘see’ colours when they look at numbers and letters. Some can even taste the colour of food or see the colour of words, or music as it comes out of a speaker.

You may even be one of these people yourself. But even if you’re not, the idea of synaesthesia can be very useful when thinking about how prospects experience the branding of your business.

Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success, says that the widespread use of MRI brain scans in recent years confirms that people are almost always emotional decision-makers. In other words, people feel before they think, and emotional reactions come before rational ones. But in business  marketing, where measurement systems rely mostly on what people think, this fact is often overlooked.

This means that the emotional thing has be to the fore when we do our own marketing and branding. We’ve got to be more about getting into hearts more than getting into heads. That’s where the synaesthesia idea comes in. Dan Hill tells us to think of the brain like a pinball machine. You can build up your score with associations “that light up in people’s minds”, thereby triggering different emotional responses.

Sounds good in theory, but how does the business owner put all that into practice?

Think about what you did when you first developed the personality of your business – logo, strapline, brand colours and so on. You may not have called it research, but that’s definitely what it was.

You  and your copywriter drew such detailed pictures of prospects that you could almost see them standing in front of you. You answered questions about what they would look for in a product or service like yours. You studied the competition till your brain hurt and you eventually came up with ways that your offering was different. Then you took those key benefits and you used them as the prime raw material for all your marketing.

But you need to take it one stage further. Reaching prospects emotionally means getting prospects to feel these benefits, not just understand them.

A joke is only funny if you get it straight away, not if someone has to explain it to you. Branding which combines fresh, original copy with striking visual metaphors will help create the ‘synaesthetic marketing effect’ to help prospects ‘get’ you, and thereby become new clients or customers. Synaesthete or not, that should bring a little colour into your day!

Best Words

www.bestwords.co.uk

Hearing through the noise

HAVE YOU NOTICED how ‘noisy’ things are for us business owners these days? If you’re like me, you’re receiving lots of messages from business support services which open with statements like: “In these credit-crunch times…”  or “In today’s difficult climate…”

It may seem strange to say it, but maybe there’s just a little too much advice out there at the moment. Yes times are challenging. And yes, there are brilliant business advisers and coaches out there. But you know what?

Many small businesses are actually coping quite well, despite all the negative hype. I’d never tell anyone to knock back useful business advice, but if you’re managing to steer your outfit through these choppy waters, what you probably need most right now is a good old fashioned, non- patronising pat on the back.

And yet, despite the current ‘everyone’s-an-expert’ scenario, there really are great business ideas and tips out there. So how do we cut through all of this Internet‘noise’ and get to the good stuff?

The micro-blogging service Twitter is one fantastic way to connect quickly and simply with what’s most useful to you and your business. If you’re on Twitter I’m sure you agree. The best bit for me is that you only have 140 characters to get your point across. That’s what is going to make a real difference to the way people write. And hopefully talk as well.

Have you ever been at a breakfast networking meeting and uttered a silent prayer of thanks when somebody’s 60- second business pitch was timed out? You knew as soon as it started that the presentation was going to be tedious and ineffectual: “Good morning, my name is Boringus Maximus and my company is Business Snooze Ltd. We specialise in optimised…. solutions… deliverables… blah blah blah…”

It’s noise in your ear. But then, praise be, the minute is up. You are, literally, saved by the bell. Otherwise who knows how long he would have gone on? (And on).

Many business blogs are like that aren’t they? Rambling, dry and almost impossible to read. Many are up there just for the search engines, not people.

If business writing – online or offline – is actually going to be read, it has to cut to the chase, by relating to our buying needs. And we’ll respond much better if it’s precise, attractive, and easy to read.

That’s what Twitter makes us get better and better at doing. If you’re using Tweetdeck and you go over the 140 characters, your whole message comes up red. Danger! Alert!  Better go back and change something. Oh, and while I’m there I’ll put this word here instead of here. And wouldn’t it be more appealing if I added a funny word here.

And so on.

The more people that use Twitter, the better they’re going to get at making every word count. Which will mean less ‘noise’ for us to cope with.

What do you think? Is Twitter working for you?

Hallowed halls…proud tradition…highest standards…zzz…zzz

Independent schools need ‘bums on seats’. Which means they need marketing. But looking at the vast majority of their websites you just wouldn’t think so.

Have you ever  arrived at an independent school’s home page and  had to read a load of stuff about ‘attractive grounds’, ‘proud traditions’,'outstanding results’ etc? That’s all fine, I’m sure – but not if the school is relying on this site to attract and convert prospective parents.

If you’ve read anything about marketing, you’ll be familiar with the mantra about ‘leading with benefits’. You’ll also know about the importance of addressing prospects’ needs. Spacious, leafy settings are all very well, but why leave it to the visitor of the site to work out how their child can benefit from such an idyllic setting?

Let me -in my characteristically modest manner – illustrate with ‘one I made earlier’:

See how this copy addresses the visitor directly, bringing 3 schools into one in the process? The prospective parent is given a tricky question which is answered simply, thus eliminating the need for difficult choices. Choose us and you get all of this.

From this point the site takes prospects on a tour, highlighting the benefits of different aspects of the school. Visitors to this site won’t see a video of the head teacher strolling towards them through leafy glades, bragging about academic success or sporting prowess. The web copy is the guide here, and it lets the benefits speak loud and clear.

So how does your school website stack up? Does it remain bragging and aloof – or does it ‘go the distance’ with features, and highlight what children and their parents have to gain by becoming part of this school community?

http://www.bestwords.co.uk