Tuesday, October 26, 2021

This Halloween, Exorcise These Gremlins From Your Marketing Content

Here we go with another Halloween season -- as if business owners and marketing content managers didn't face enough potentially scary problems all year round. Fortunately, many of us view Halloween more as a harmless source of innocent fun than a hair-raising event; more treat than trick, if you will. But you may still want to take this opportunity to take a close look at your marketing content's vulnerabilities this Halloween, if only to make sure you're ready for major sales opportunities like the upcoming winter holiday rush. If you see the following destructive gremlins lurking around your website, social media, print marketing, or other marketing content, take the necessary steps to drive these ghouls away.



Dead Branding

A company's brand is a living organism that grows, evolves, and adapts to changing circumstances, from a new direction for the company itself to updated audience expectations. It's not a static entity that you can simply set and forget. Did you leave your brand for dead years ago? Maybe it's time you administered a checkup (or conducted an autopsy) to determine whether your marketing content's style, tone, and information match up with your business's current brand vision and image. It might require a resurrection in the form of some new, fresh material.

The Headless Home Page

You've probably put a lot of care and effort into the creation of your website content, from those all-important "About" and "Services" pages to the blog that hosts your attention-getting social media. So why do prospective buyers keep jumping off the site after a brief visit to the home page? The answer might lie in the way you've laid it out. It's all too common to see beautiful-looking home pages that sport fancy animated top banners -- followed directly by testimonials, links to other pages, special offers, or contact information. But where's the introductory content? A home page without a properly compelling introduction is like a news story without a hook or a body without a head. If you left off this key lead-in to your online sales funnel, it's  time to make like Dr. Frankenstein and perform some much-needed surgery to stitch it into place.

Business Productivity Vampires

Does marketing content creation take up a huge piece of your valuable time as a business owner or marketing manager? If so, you may have a productivity vampire that could do with a stake through its heart. Marketing content requires creativity, mental energy, and effort -- all of which you could make better use of in other key aspects of your business. But wait: Don't you need to invest in high-quality marketing content if you want to boost your sales and brand visibility? Of course you do. That's why you can benefit greatly from handing the task of content creation over to a dedicated professional like an experienced freelance copywriter. We're like garlic to productivity vampires. Contact me and see for yourself!



Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Want to Convince Potential Customers? Write Case Studies for Your Company

When you're trying to decide on a particular solutions provider for your personal, household, or workplace needs, what piece of evidence serves as the final tipping point? While some technically-minded folks might fixate on a particular specification or feature, many others will respond to a first-hand account of how that provider helped somebody else in a similar situation. You can (and probably should) spread the word by sharing your success stories through in-person networking opportunities. But if you'd rather dazzle your whole target market in one fell swoop, it's time to start writing case studies for your company.

A typical case study takes a short-and-sweet form, unlike its more detailed big brother, the white paper. You'll want to include the following basic elements:

Introduction

Introduce the subject of the case study to your readers. Give a brief description that includes the client's line of work, its status within its industry or profession, and anything else that might make a prospective buyer say, "Yep, that's a lot like what we do." 

Challenge

What kind of challenge brought this client to your door? What problem did the company have, and how was it damaging either their current business or their ability to grow? What other solutions, if any, had they tried without success? (Don't slam another company by name; just indicate how they tried and failed to solve the problem before discovering you.)

Solution

How did you evaluate the client's problem, and what steps did you take to diagnose any underlying causes? What measures did you recommend to fix the problem? How did you implement those measures, and how long did the process take? You don't have to go into a huge amount of detail. but make sure you explain your strategies and tactics in enough detail that the reader can get an impression of your expertise.

Results

None of the sections above will really matter unless you go on to describe their final effectiveness. Get specific here by providing whatever hard numbers will really make an impact. "As a result of our efforts, Company X increased its annual revenue by 32% percent within just 2.5 years," and so on.

Testimonial

A testimonial quote from a client representative serves as the icing on your case study cake; it's the closest thing to a direct referral in terms of its ability to sway readers. but resist the temptation to drop an entire wall of praise, no matter how glowing, into your case study. Isolate the most powerful sentences in your client's account and position them at the end of the case study for maximum impact.

Once you've collected all the necessary data for your case study, do you have to write it yourself? Certainly not! If you're looking for a professional writer with years of experience writing case studies and other kinds of marketing content, bring your success story to me and let's tell the world in style!