Written Content and Visual Design: 2 Peas in Your Marketing Pod

 When the word "marketing" enters your head, do you think of arresting visuals, or do you imagine compelling statements that demand an audiences' attention and inspire further interest in your products or services? Most likely, you envision both of these elements working together -- which is just as it should be. The written content and visual design elements that express your brand image and marketing message must mesh in a concerted effort to make your business shine. So let's look at how to get the best possible use out of these two peas in your marketing pod.

First, let's establish what we mean when we talk about visual design. In this case, I refer to two primary skill sets: graphic design and web design. Graphic design traditionally includes all the static visual elements of your marketing "look," from your company's logo and color scheme to the way images lead the eye through a brochure, sales sheet, PowerPoint presentation, or trade show display area. Web design creates and positions these visual elements in a dynamic online format, with bits and pieces that may change according to what kind of screen the viewer encounters them on (a technique called responsive web design) or as you add continuous updates to your portfolio, services, or biographical data. 

Web design and graphic design may differ somewhat in their requirements. For instance, certain fonts and color arrangements that work like gangbusters on a website may not look good on a print piece, and vice versa. Ideally, you want to create a design language that will work equally well for both offline and offline media.

Where does content writing enter the picture, so to speak? Well, it may come at the beginning, or it may show up later in the process. Of course your designers will want to have the basic look of your brand firmly in hand right from the beginning, while your web team will probably have some clear ideas about the basic formatting and layout decisions for your website. But the content-first approach often makes good sense for print marketing pieces. I've worked with graphic designers who used my content as a creative springboard to generate visual ideas for a onesheet, brochure, or direct marketing postcard. In some cases, a web designer may also make layout decisions based, at least in part, on what the written content seems to call for.

Ideally, your copywriter and your visual design team try to complement each other as seamlessly as possible (under the direction of a marketing director or coordinator who keeps everyone moving in the same direction). When I'm writing for a project that will include visual design, I talk to the designer about the overall concept and try to leave plenty of room for visual elements in my work. If the designer has trouble fitting my content into the design, I may need to trim it down. If I present an idea that lends itself to a particular image, the designer may want to fit such an image above, below, or alongside it. The main thing is that we're aligned as a creative unit to produce a final result that sells.

As an experienced freelance copywriter, I maintain relationships with many graphic designers and web designers. If you need both written marketing content and marketing design skills, contact me today and I'll hook you up with both!

4 Kinds of Content Marketing That Can Boost Your Business

The world of marketing seems to grow more complex every day. Like some many-headed mythical beast, a modern-day marketing campaign often makes use of multiple media channels and platforms, not to mention multiple kinds of content, to draw their target audience into their sales funnel. With so many kinds of content marketing to choose from, which ones are most likely to make a difference in your success? Let's look at four powerful traffic drivers worth considering.

1. Blog Posts

As I've pointed out in the past, your company blog can give you an online voice that constantly reinforces your online authority and relevance as a major player in your industry. Certain types of blog posts can prove especially effective in this regard. For instance, list posts have grown immensely popular for their ability to pack several compelling points into a shareable, easy-to-digest format. (Look no further than this very post for an example.) These points don't have to well up from the depths of your own imagination; you can collect compelling bits of data from all over the Internet, if need be. I've seen entire posts that consisted simply of inspiring quotes related to a particular topic. You can also interview celebrity guests or invite them to blog on your site.

2. Infographics

Infographics combine written content and visual design into a uniquely user-friendly package. How many times have you found yourself zeroing in on a helpful infographic embedded in a larger article or web page? Just as you don't necessarily have to write all your own blog content, you don't have to have graphic design skills to create infographics for your content marketing campaign. Your copywriter can work with the graphic designer of your choice to produce infographics that make a big splash with your potential buyers.

3. Long-Form Guides

Nothing demonstrates a business's expertise more thoroughly than a detailed, practical guide that helps people understand a concept or solve a problem. These guides often take the forms of eBooks, industry reports, white papers, quarterly newsletters, or plus-sized articles. You can make these pieces available in return for the interested party's contact information or subscription. This approach builds your prospect lists and helps pre-qualify leads, especially if you end up sending your subscribers a steady stream of helpful information.

4. Videos

Did you know that people spend one-third of their online time watching videos? This form of content marketing can entertain, enlighten, and compel sales just as effectively as others that rely on writing and graphic design. Just about anything you can convey through a blog post, infographic, or guide can prove equally effective in video format. Just don't make the mistake of assuming that you can simply take some video footage, slap a voice-over narration on it, and call it a day. Videos require careful organization and structure, with narration that really sells and graphic images that support the moving pictures and reinforce your brand identity.

There are plenty of other kinds of content marketing that I could (and very well may) write about in future posts. For now, however, these four key types of content marketing should keep you busy and boost your revenue. Contact me if you need help bringing your content to life!

Fit to Print: The Art of Print Marketing Content

I devote a lot of electronic ink to the online copywriting experience, but rest assured that print marketing is not dead. I field plenty of requests to write content for trifold brochures, onesheets, flyers, direct mail, newsletters, door hangers -- if it involves applying ink to processed tree pulp, I've probably written for it. And just as effective web writing has its own set of rules, you can apply certain techniques and ways of thinking toward improving your print marketing content. Here are some things to keep in mind the next time you're faced with the proverbial blank page.

Thinking Collaboratively - The most effective print marketing pieces rely on an equal creative partnership between the copywriter and the graphic designer. Some items will naturally begin life as an arresting image, while others will take their cue from a grabby opening statement or final tag line. I've gotten writing ideas a designer's initial sketches, just as designers have built their visual approaches around my first drafts. Ideally, both of these individuals are working together from the beginning to create a piece that works on both levels to create an integrated expression of your message.

Painting a Picture - When you're writing for a brochure, onesheet or other print marketing piece, you find out in a big hurry that less is indeed more in the wonderful world of marketing copy. You've got to keep in mind that big chunks of the final product will be filled up with photos, charts, logos and other illustrations. Your writing must not only make make room for these aspects of design; it must acknowledge and enhance them. The last thing a mailer or other space-challenged piece needs is a wall of text in a microscopic font. Think about those TV ads that have the big mess of fine print shoved into the bottom of the screen. Ever wonder what all that stuff says? Me neither.

Breaking It Down - No matter how much or how little text your print marketing piece can accommodate, solid blocks of it create unnecessary eyestrain (and brain strain) for the reader, especially in today's "absorb it a glance or toss it" world. If the copy lends itself to subdivision, break it down into bulleted lists, statements or short paragraphs. This practice not only helps readers zoom in on the information that rocks their world the hardest, but it also adds visual variety to the layout and gives the graphic designer more options for positioning the text in clever ways.

Keep in mind that different print marketing formats will call for a different mix of information and "sizzle." While a brochure can offer a leisurely guided tour toward a final call to action, a mailer may have to nail the reader from the outset with an arresting image and/or phrase. Whatever your needs, an experienced marketing copywriter, preferably one who is used to working with graphic designers, can help you choose those words as wisely as possible. If if you feel you could use that kind of expertise -- well, you know what to do!

Beyond Copywriting: The Key Players on Your Marketing Team

In my many years as a freelance copywriter in Austin and San Antonio, I've received plenty of requests to write for clients who didn't have all their marketing ducks in a row. They knew they needed top-quality marketing content from an experienced copywriter, but they hadn't engaged the other members of their marketing team. It's pretty hard to write content that will integrate flawlessly with an imaginary website or non-existent visual design, or without any clue what the most important keywords will be, or without knowing how the content will be implemented across multiple marketing channels. That's why I urge clients to gather their entire go-to team of marketing professionals before commissioning marketing content. Let's look at some of the key players you'll want to include in your lineup.

The Copywriter

Your copywriter serves as your written content resource. The right words make an enormous difference in persuading your target audience of your message as quickly and efficiently as possible. Since Google's algorithm has made relevant, professional-sounding content a top priority in recent years, the days of simple "keyword stuffing" are long gone -- you actually have to tell your story, and tell it well. That's a job for a professional. Your copywriter can also contribute to the conceptual stage of your marketing campaign through creative brainstorming, or make fixes to any existing content that just doesn't get the job done.

The Graphic Designer

What your copywriter is to your words, your graphic designer is to your pictures. The graphic designer is the architect of your brand's look. From creating original logos and determining your company color scheme to crafting individual marketing pieces, this artist understands how images influence potential buyers. Look for a graphic designer who feels equally at home in both print and digital media, since these two forms make their own specific visual demands.

The Web Designer/Developer

Web designers create the appearance and layout of your website and its various pages, working in collaboration with graphic designers as needed. Effective web design not only makes your website look compelling and professional; it also ensures a good user experience to improve retention and conversion. The web developer takes those designs and codes them expertly into the site, using state-of--the-art programming languages. When hiring these professionals, make sure they'll grant you some degree of user customization and administrative access to it. You don't want to be "locked out" of your own website if you ever happen to lose the people who put it together.

The SEO Expert

Search engine optimization makes the online marketing world go round. SEO strategies and tactics can take a variety of forms, from the sensible, elegant use of keywords in your written content (organic SEO) to the "under-the-hood" SEO achieved through meta-tags and other subtle website features. Some website providers include SEO among their services, while some SEO experts double as web design/development professionals.

The Social Media Coordinator

Today's marketing campaigns must embrace not only traditional print and website activities but the wide world of social media as well. Unfortunately, there are so many social media channels to choose from that you could easily spend most of your waking hours keeping track of them all. It's all too easy to neglect one important channel in favor of another, or to upload content in such a haphazard manner that your audience can't follow you easily. Your social media coordinator can focus on this activity exclusively, making sure that the right content is going onto the right channel at the right time.

The Printer

Print marketing is alive and well -- and most businesses need some form of it just as much as they need its digital equivalent. It's great to have close ties to a professional printing company that can make any kind of print marketing materials you might need, from 3D signage to event banners and vehicle wraps. A fully-equipped printer offers both traditional offset printing and advanced digital printing options. Some also have on-site graphic designers, thus filling two spots on your go-to marketing team roster while ensuring visual consistency across all your print marketing pieces.

The Marketing Strategist

The marketing strategist has the most important job of all: designing your company's marketing plan and supervising that plan's implementation. This expert is the first professional you want to talk to. Your marketing strategist can help you understand exactly who your audience is, where that audience tends to hang out, and what kinds of messaging that audience tends to respond to. A well-connected marketing strategist may even be able to find the other members of your marketing team for you, giving each of them their marching orders and coordinating their activities.

So there you have it -- the key players in your quest for brilliant marketing. Go get 'em!

How Big Is Your Marketing Team? As Big As You Need It to Be!

The first quarter of a business year is a time when many businesses take a hard look at their hiring needs and practices. Are they equipped with the right core team of skilled workers to handle the demands of the coming months or years? This can be a tricky question if their needs revolve around occasional projects instead of a predictable flow of activity. Keeping a full-time staff on payroll often results in businesses paying certain employees to do next to nothing at certain times of year.

That's why cost-conscious businesses are increasingly adopting a nimble business model that relies heavily on outsourcing. The benefits are obvious: Bring independent contractors on board only when you need their services, and you can effectively expand or contract your operation as needed for optimal efficiency. Outsourcing is the new normal for many industries and fields of endeavor -- including (I'm happy to say) marketing content creation and distribution.

Outsourcing Your Marketing Efforts

It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why businesses who feel the need to tighten their belts start by slashing their marketing operations. Of all departments and functions you could eliminate, this is the one most likely to bring in more customers and boost revenue, right? And yet somehow it isn't seen as one of those areas critical for helping to "keep the lights on," so organizations either pull back on it or under-invest in it from the beginning. But if you're outsourcing your marketing to a team of skilled professionals, then you can have it both ways. Hire those freelance marketing specialists on a seasonal or per-project basis and won't have to pay out regular salaries to these individuals. Along the way you'll also save on:

• Payroll operations expenses
• Workers compensation premiums
• Unemployment compensation
• Social Security and Medicare payments

Outsourcing for Marketing Agencies

The outsourcing model makes even more sense for small marketing agencies. If your agency is just starting out and needs to keep its operations as cost effective as humanly possible, why not outsource the bulk of the "heavy lifting" (copywriting, graphic layout, coding, social media management etc.) to a small group of trusted, experienced freelancers? The longer these folks collaborate with each other (and with you) on various projects, the more solid a team they'll eventually form. Once you're flush with new clients and you're ready to bring on a permanent creative bullpen, invite these professionals into the fold full-time -- or if everyone's happy with the status quo, keep on outsourcing and saving. If a couple of members aren't working out, it's easy enough to swap them out for others until you have the ideal mix.

Don't let your business revenues stall because you're afraid to invest in your marketing engine; instead, take an attractive financial shortcut without selling your marketing quality short. Hire a freelance copywriter, designer or other pros to obtain all the marketing effort you need -- and none that you don't!

Different Content for Different Applications: Blogs vs. Email Marketing vs. Direct Mail

If you've been involved with marketing for any length of time, you're well aware of the need to put fresh, relevant content in front of your target audience on a regular basis. You may also understand the need to approach different kinds of audiences with variations in content, style and tone. What how does your choice of medium impact what you say and how you say it? Let's look at three popular content marketing channels -- blogs, email drip campaigns and direct mail -- to see how these different media use written content.

Content for Blogs

Your organization's blog can serve a multitude of purposes as a powerful inbound marketing tool. It's your website's dedicated news channel, announcing important advances, product or service rollouts, changes in key personnel and other exciting tidings. It's a thought leadership resource, feeding your readers valuable information that they can use in their own lives. It can even act as a straight-up billboard to promote that big upcoming sale. For the most part, however, these tidbits are presented in the form of articles -- articles meant to pop up in search results when your prospect seeks the online solution to a pressing problem or question. So you want to create genuinely helpful, interesting, engaging articles on a wide range of "evergreen" topics that relate directly to what you do. Some of them might be bound to a specific time of year or situation, while others are presented more as introductions to basic concepts -- not sales pitches. A critical feature of blog articles is the judicious use of keywords in your titles, headers and body text -- with them, you can expect your wisdom to go unread.

Content for Email Drip Campaigns

On the surface, email articles for drip marketing campaigns may not appear too different from blog articles, offering a few hundred words of useful information in an entertaining, readable manner. But there's one big difference -- these articles are written as responses to specific actions taken (or not taken) by the readers. For example, prospects who expressed initial interest in a product but failed to buy it might receive an article about how to select the ideal (whatever the product is) for their needs, prompting them to take a second look at the item they passed up. Email offers can be triggered in the same way. Customers who haven't purchased anything in, say, six months might receive a special "thank you" offer such as 10 percent off their next total purchase price. When you prepare these pieces, you first need to lay out a decision tree of directives: "If they do X, send them email Y," "If they don't do X, send them email Z," and so forth. You then create the individual content to suit each "if/then" trigger point in your plan.

Content for Direct Mail

Direct mail print marketing campaigns can take lots of different forms, from "personal" letters to colorful postcards, and they may use the same automated triggering strategy as an email drip campaign. But they also tend to have a broader, more general reach because the initial round of mail is sent out to everyone in a particular set of zip codes, not just those who have had previous dealings with the brand. The content you create for these pieces must therefore make a bigger, louder, more sales-y splash than either blog content or targeted email content. You might include a few lines of information or education text in there somewhere, but let's face it -- most people are conditioned to receive their serious information online, especially in this age of mobile marketing via smart devices. So save your brassiest, most blatant promotions, sales, announcements, and calls to action for the printed word, and let the other media do the heavy lifting.

All three types of marketing can be highly effective in helping you increase sales and grow your business. Just make sure you're using each medium to its best advantage by providing the right content for the right job. And if you find it all a bit overwhelming, don't hesitate to contact a professional copywriter for help!

Words and Pictures: Combining Copywriting with Visual Media

We live in a very visual world. Even experiencing written text is a visual process (unless of course you're reading this in Braille or listening to it through your computer's voice). Marketing has always combined words and pictures to hit prospective customers from two different directions in a coordinated attack. So let's look at how a copywriter works alongside various visual artists as part of an organization's potent creative team.

Print Design

Copywriting and graphic design have always gone hand in hand in the creation of print marketing collateral such as brochures, onesheets and media kits. But how do these two forces collaborate smoothly? In my experience, that all starts with you -- or at least with your business's marketing coordinator. You must have a clear vision of the piece's objectives (brand reinforcement, promotion of a specific service), target audience, and call to action.

Once you've got that settled, it's time to call in the troops. There are times when the visual elements of a piece are intended to dominate everything else in the message, and on those occasions it will be natural for the graphic designer to take the lead, providing the writer with a concept to draw inspiration from. Other pieces may be largely driven by the text, which means that the writer takes the lead and the designer designs around the marketing copy. Plan your production and communication pipelines accordingly to ensure an efficient, non-confusing workflow.

Web Design

The relationship between copywriting and web design can prove somewhat tricker than that between writer and graphic designer. Proper website design must accommodate all sorts of variables, from the visual elements of your brand (logo, color scheme etc.) to text layout that creates maximum impact and directs the reader to click through to the next stop along your online sales funnel. This is complicated by the fact that today's commercial websites really need to be responsive in design, scaling up or down not only in size but also in the amount of content displayed on different types of screens. The copywriter must be able to provide text that can selectively "drop ballast" from one screen resolution to the next while still providing all the key points.

The balance between copy and layout is also crucial for landing pages -- those deep product or service pages where you really drive home the sales pitch. Landing pages are always text driven, but the way that text is arranged on the page can make a huge difference. You'll want to make sure that your designer has placed the text front and center, in an ultra-legible font and surrounded by plenty of white space for easy reading. The copywriter should break his content into lots of short-ish paragraphs, punctuated by dramatic headings that the designer can present in a bold, sensationalistic manner.

Video

How does your copywriter collaborate with your video production team? First and foremost, there's the script. Even a marketing video with no dialogue or dramatic scenes needs a narrative spine, from a shot list that tells the director and videographer what to shoot to a voice-over script that makes sense of what the viewer sees. You'll want to bring your copywriter into the video production process right from the very beginning, because it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to revise a script draft, which is essentially just a blueprint for later collaborative action, than to rearrange an entire production schedule.

Once you've made your video, you still need to promote it, and here's where copywriting plays yet another essential role. If you plan on posting your video on YouTube, Kickstarter or some other online platform, your copywriter can create descriptive text to go with it on the appropriate page. This can range from a cute or exciting introductory blurb to a full page of product description and promotion. 

Anyway, you get the idea. Words and pictures go together like peanut butter and jelly in practically any marketing strategy. So assemble your go-to creative team, give them the right guidance to get them started, and then watch them deliver the total experience you need to sell your stuff!