My company, Articulate Marketing, helps big tech companies communicate better about their products and services. A large part of my work is writing editorial-style content for websites. My credentials are my work for HP, Microsoft, eBay and others.

In the past couple of weeks, several people have asked me for advice about becoming a web copywriter, so here it is:

1. Learn to write well

The first thing is to become a good writer. You can become better by writing more and being mindful while you do it. This means writing at least 1,000 words a day. It also means constantly thinking about how to be a better writer as you do it. Several techniques have worked well for me:

• Look at good and bad copy on other people’s sites and analyse why it works or doesn’t work. This is also a good trick to get you started on a new assignment.
• Apply the techniques of other media, in particular newspaper journalism.
• Get an independent proofreader. Not only is this a time saver but it can save you from embarrassing typos. I work with Sarah Bee and, mainly, Fullproof. (But not for my blog - I’m too cheap!)
• Get a writer’s bookshelf. I recommend The Pyramid Principle, The Economist Style Guide, Writing to Deadline (also see my 10-minute summary of the book), Stephen King’s On Writing (yes, really!) and Strunk and White. Read and inwardly digest.
• There are some useful online reference sites too.
• Read good writing. Most web copy is non-fiction prose so I recommend reading good non-fiction prose. The New Yorker, The Economist, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly are all good places to start. Of course, read the trade papers of your target market too.
• Learn how to concentrate on writing.
• Do you want to know the short cut to really good writing that rings true for readers? Simple: good interviews with smart people translated into readable prose. That’s it. Learn how to interview someone.
• Read Bad Language. Yes, I know this is self-promotion but I have written hundreds of thousands of words about the kind of writing I do on this site. You can’t beat the price.

2. Know your subject

The secret of making reasonable money at writing is to find a niche and become an expert. Nobody asks for the cheapest brain surgeon. The more expertise you can demonstrate, the less risky the assignment becomes for your client AND the more efficiently you can produce the work. It’s a win-win situation.

That doesn’t mean you have to stay in one area forever. I started out writing business journalism for magazines like Director and Real Business, then I wrote about aviation and did some cool techie stuff for Wired and Popular Science. It’s more a case not trying to take on any job, on any subject.

What to start with? Easy. What are you interested in? What do you know about? What do you like reading about? What are you curious about? Make a list and pick two or three areas to begin with. See what comes up.

Once you have some traction in a given area, look for ways to expand your knowledge. Trade shows are a great way to immerse yourself in a topic. Do lots of interviews with people inside your client - more than you need to - so you find out more about their world. Read the trade press. If you can, try the products or services yourself.

3. Learn to write for the web

The key thing to remember - tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids and never forget it - is that writing for the web is not the same as writing for print. Here are some tips: Avoid PDFs, shorter by about 50 per cent compared to print, free of hype or marketing polyfiller, free of long words and jargon, written for scanning: bullets, highlighting, shorter paragraphs.

• Read books on usability: Homepage Usability: 50 Homepages Deconstructed, Prioritzing Web Usability, Don’t Make Me Think.
• Erect an altar to Jakob Nielsen and visit his website: www.useit.com. Even better, go to one of NNGroup’s conferences.
• Look at good and bad writing online. Read online with a critical eye.
• Learn about how websites are built. Build one yourself, if you can. If not, spend time with a website design company - volunteer your services for free if they’ll teach you.

4. Market yourself

If you build it, they will NOT come. You have to get out there and tell people about what you do and ask them for their business. The good news is that good online copywriting is a rare, beautiful thing. There is a market. Open doors by asking the question: ‘are you happy with the copy on your website?’

• Get a website and a proper email address. No-one is going to take you seriously as a web writer if you don’t know how to do this and rely on a Yahoo! or Google Mail address.
• Get a professional website. You don’t have to spend a lot of money (I built mine for nothing using HTML. It’s not perfect but doing it myself shows that I know something about how a website is built.)
• Get a blog. This is part-showcase, part-playground. Learn to blog like a pro.
• Learn to say no. Not all work is good work. There are crooks out there who will try to get you to work for peanuts. Just say no. Also, try to avoid busy-work. Stuff that makes you think you’re working hard but just doesn’t pay well enough to justify itself. Better to spend more time marketing yourself to the right people to get work at the right price. Sometimes copywriting isn’t the right answer for clients.
• Read my 27 proven freelance marketing tips.

5. It’s a business, stupid

Never forget that you have to make your income exceed your expenditure and that if you run out of cash and you have bills to pay, you’re bankrupt. Along the way, it would be nice to have a roof over your head, food to eat and some toys. In other words, never forget that you’re running a business.

• Work hard. Get up early. Work late. Concentrate. Drink tea.
• Business plan. You need a proper plan. Mine is typically 2-4 pages and I use it to set goals, benchmark progress and think through potential problems. I update it regularly.
• Read The Beermat Entrepreneur and Sales on a Beermat. They are simple, easy-to-read guides to starting out on your own. Not everything in them applies to a one-person business but they’re best books of their type that I’ve read.
• Be clear about your prices. Tell them how much you’re worth. Don’t wait for them to tell you how much they want to pay. The simple rule for figuring out your daily rate is to work out how much you want to earn and divide by the number of days a year that you are willing to work, after deducting sufficient time for marketing and admin. There are about 240 working days in a year and you’ll want to spend about one day a week on non-billable stuff.
• Big little company. Aim to be a big little company. By this I mean, use technology to give you the same resources as a really big company. For example, LogoWorks can do a Wolff Olins for your brand for as little as $99. TimeBridge can take the place of a diary secretary. See Tools for Writing on this site for more ways to out-big your competitors.
• Don’t be afraid of big companies. Selling to multinationals is easier than you think and often less grief than dealing with smaller companies.
• Better briefs. Make sure that you have agreed the basics in writing. A detailed brief can avoid a lot of misunderstandings. Nearly every problem project of mine started with an unclear or non-existent brief. Do as I say, not as I do!
• Traffic management. When you get a job, book the time to do it. Don’t miss deadlines. Don’t let things fall through the cracks. Time is somewhat elastic when you’re self-employed because you can work late or over the weekend, but you can’t do two weeks’ work in three days. As you become more successful, this kind of traffic management will become increasingly important.
• Don’t hire anyone. Subcontractors are okay but staff need offices, pensions, healthcare and management. Why bother? Believe me, I’ve done the CEO bit and it’s much more fun and much more profitable to stay as a company of one.

6. Other relevant links on this site

• Buzzwords from hell
• Rules of thumb for writing
• How to surprise and delight readers
• How to be a freelance journalist

If you enjoyed this article or found it useful, please Digg it using the buttons below and I’ll be your friend.

I watched The Apprentice last night. The task involved presenting ideas for a greetings card to three different card shops. Both teams botched the presentations monumentally.  Why?

• Too formal.
• Hectoring.
• Talking but not listening.
• Too much machismo masking too little self-confidence.
• Standing up.
• Humourless.
• Dependent on the script.
• Too little preparation.
• (Probably) too long and verbose.
• Using jargon and clichés.
• Inappropriate use of rhetoric. In one case, the presented lapsed into the worst kind of green hectoring with rhetorical questions (”Did you know that…”). It just alienates people.

In short, they turned into monsters. Unrecognisable as human beings. Totally unfriendly, untrustworthy and boring. It’s a common problem.

Last week, I saw a presentation that worked really well. The future of the internet and how to stop it by Jonathan Zittrain at the RSA. (Download the MP3 version.) It was witty, relaxed, informal, engaging and while he did use PowerPoint, there was no text on the slides only pictures. As my old history tutor might have said, you can use PowerPoint like a drunk uses a lamp post - for illumination or support but not both at the same time. What worked for him:

• Good jokes
• A compelling story that builds an argument
• Responsiveness to the audience
• Friendliness
• Obvious mastery of the subject and willing to go into more detail on different points
• A quarter of the allotted time given over to questions
• Jargon- and cliché-free

My wife’s theatre company, C Company, is running a course today for a London PR firm. The actors in her company all train in the Meisner technique. Its central tenet is responsiveness which means putting your attention on the other person and adjusting your own acting in response to them. The catchphrase is “living truthfully under a given set of circumstances raised to the optics of the theatre.”  It’s an interesting sidelight on the whole question. 

Perhaps it’s applicability to presentations is summer up by the quote from Wikipedia: “Solid preparation supports the spontaneity, an idea articulated by Martha Graham when she wrote, ‘I work eight hours a day, every day, so that in the evenings I can improvise.’”

(As an aside, it was depressing to watch one team argue for three hours about whether ‘National Singles’ Day’ should have an apostrophe and if so, where?  They even rang the editor of the Daily Telegraph for advice. What do they teach in schools?)

“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs,” said Kenneth Clark at the end of his classic TV series Civilisation.

I was struck by this when I watched the series years ago and it rattles around in my brain quite often.

In countries, companies and, yes, individual lives the importance of confidence, of morale is critical to success but often overlooked.

Just today, I came across William Slim’s book Defeat into Victory on my bookshelf. He stands alongside Montgomery as one of the outstanding British generals of World War II. But since he was self-effacing by nature and fought the ‘forgotten war’ in the Far East, he had less fame than Monty. He deserved more.

It fell open at a well-marked page which I think captures the point better than I ever could. He is writing about a time in the war when the British were on the back foot in Burma and things, generally, were very bleak.

Morale is a state of mind. It is that intangible force which will move a whole group of men to give their last ounce to achieve something, without counting the cost to themselves; that makes them feel they are part of something greater than themselves. … I remember sitting in my office and tabulating these foundations of morale something like this:

1. Spritual

(a) There must be a great and noble object.

(b) Its achievement must be vital.

(c) The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.

(d) The man must feel that what he is and what he does matters directly towards the attainment of the object.

2. Intellectual

(a) He must be convinced that the object can be attained; that it is not out of reach

(b) He must see, too, that the organization to which he belongs and which is striving to attain the object is an efficient one.

(c) He must have confidence in his leaders and know that whatever dangers and hardships he is called upon to suffer, his life will not be lightly flung away.

3. Material

(a) The man must feel that he will get a fair deal from his commanders and from the army generally.

(b) He must, as far as humanly posssible, be given the best weapons and equipment for his task.

(c) His living and working conditions must be made as good as they can be.

Substitute ‘company’ for ‘army’ and ‘career’ for ‘life’ and change ‘he’ to ‘he or she’ and I think you have a pretty good recipe for creating an extraordinary company.

I’ve been evaluating Timebridge and it TOTALLY RULES!

It solves a problem that I have had for a long time. Booking interviews takes a long time. You negotiate back and forth by email or phone to find a mutually convenient time. Multiply this effort by a dozen interviews a week and it really adds up to a lot of wasted time.

I’ve been looking for a piece of software that would

• Let interviewees see my availability online
• Allow them to book a convenient time themselves
• Confirm the meeting using emailed meeting requests
• Link to Microsoft Outlook 2007

At one point, I was even going to pay a software developer to write a piece of software to do it for me.

Amazingly, Timebridge does everything I wanted. It’s almost as if they read the specification I wrote. And it’s free.

Marketing matters. Even for freelancers. Especially for freelancers. Here are the things that work for me:

1. Wake up!  No marketing = no business. This realisation is the necessary starting point.
2. Brand you. For freelancers, Tom Peters’ book The Brand You 50: Reinventing Work is fundamental. You are selling yourself as much as your time and services. Everything you do is marketing.
3. The Trusted Advisor. David Maister’s book (The Trusted Advisor) is full of good advice for freelance consultants and professionals.
4. Allocate time. It’s really important to carve out time every day to do some kind of marketing activity. It’s also important to dedicate a day or two every month (more if you’re starting out). There’s are no big bangs in marketing but you can make the universe expand steadily.
5. Daily pitch. The daily pitch is something that worked really well for me when I was a journalist. I’d just email an editor with a story idea once a day. Now, I try to contact a customer or prospective customer every day in one way or another. I might try to set up a meeting, make a call, send an interesting link etc. Sometimes, it’s just about keeping the lines of communication open. It’s all about personal contact.
6. Keep marketing when you’re busy. The biggest mistake I regularly make is to get so busy that I forget to market myself. When you’re busy, you need to be lining up the next deal so you don’t have any downtime. (It’s like the farmer with the leaky roof. When it’s raining it’s too wet to fix it and when it’s dry is just as good as any man’s house.)
7. Meetings are marketing too. If possible, never turn down an invitation to a meeting. Sometimes, those tedious interruptions are your best marketing opportunities. Big companies love big meetings and they are a good way to meet new people at your existing clients.
8. Don’t be afraid. If you have confidence in what you do, there is no reason to fear being thought ‘pushy’.  Marketing isn’t like selling second hand cars. You are trying to reach people who NEED what you have to sell and who would be customers if only they knew you existed and could help them. I think perhaps this reluctance is a peculiarly English phenomenon.
9. Think about technique. I really like Chris West and Mike Southron’s Sales on A Beermat. It’s short (always good) and it contains really helpful tips about how to make a pitch and how to generate new business. One tip which is very good for initial contacts is to ask for a ten minute meeting to introduce yourself. There aren’t many people who can’t spare ten minutes if it might be useful to them.
10. Try different things. When I started Articulate Marketing, I hired a PR company, started a blog and ran some seminars. The blog was fun and helped a little.  The seminars were fantastic and generated a lot of business. The PR didn’t help at all. There are no guarantees in marketing and the best approach is experimental and based on evidence.
11. Keep track of pitches. I use Excel to track pitches and opportunities. I do this because I keep my accounts in Excel too (I know, my accountant wants to shoot me too.) But it gives me a single page where I can see my sales pipeline, orders, work in progress, invoices outstanding, VAT and tax liability. It’s like a business control panel. I get away with Excel because my business is relatively simple from a bookkeeping perspective.  (In my last business, I used Sage and had to employ a bookkeeper and a financial controller to tell me the same information and it was always about a month after the fact. Never again.)
12. React fast. It’s vital to react quickly to requests.  A good reputation in my business comes from delivering good quality work, on brief, on budget and above all on time.  However, occasionally, my clients need me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Delivering a 2,000 word article over a weekend can save a client’s skin and people remember that stuff. In practical terms, it means being constantly available by phone and email, returning calls and emails promptly and occasionally working over the weekend. Importantly, it means seeing all this as a marketing opportunity not a huge drag.
13. Automate process.  I have a template for briefs which helps me produce a good, detailed brief for my clients very quickly. It saves them having to write it and it helps me look efficient and thorough. It’s all about thinking through the process in advance and automating or streamlining as much as possible.
14. Your obvious is your talent. An editor at Wired told me that if I wanted to write about everything, I had better be the best writer in the world. Better to be the go-to guy for aviation articles than a hack writing about every topic under the sun. As a freelancer, it’s really difficult to do everything well. Better to be a deep expert in one area and cultivate a network of agencies, friends and colleagues who can fill in the gaps.
15. Seminars. I ran ten or so seminars in 2006 and they brought in a huge amount of work and several new, big clients. I’m still dining out on the leads and goodwill they generated. It takes a bit of organising and you have to talk about something that a) is interesting to an audience and b) lets you display your talents without being too commercial. I’m thinking of running the seminars again but perhaps with more focus on social media and blogging.
16. Blog. My blog has only generated a small amount of work directly. However, it has been fun. It helped me refine and think through my ideas. It also helped establish my credentials when it came to pitching a couple of corporate blogs (see: www.hp.com/blogs/amibitiouscompanies for example). It has also been a very valuable aid to search engine optimisation.
17. Website. My website, www.articulatemarketing.com, gets many fewer visitors than my blog but I guess people who go there actually want to know about my business. The first thing most people do when they get an email or a pitch from a company is look up a website.  Companies without a website (or for that matter their own email domain name) look like small beer. 
18. Follow-up.  "Is there anything else I can do to help?" Doesn’t hurt to ask?
19. Add value. Setting up extranet to act as a library for deliverables and a way of sharing progress and deadlines with clients (I use Basecamp) is one easy way to add value. In my case, hiring a professional proofreader to check my paid-for work (but not my blog - I’m too cheap) and having proper professional indemnity insurance are two other ways.
20. Become an expert. Spend the time to understand your customer’s products and services. For example, I bought and installed Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 before I wrote about it and I am now the owner of a shiny collection of HP kit.
21. Upsell. Would you like to supersize that? There’s always some extra work or value you can offer. If they want a case study, why not offer a good deal on a PowerPoint ‘win card’ based on the same copy?
22. Attach.  Would you like fries with that?  If they want some website copy, why not offer them a website review as well?
23. Intra-company recommendations. My biggest source of new business is new people inside my existing clients. I don’t think it hurts to ask your customers if there’s anyone else they know who might be able to use your work. I find that the more work I do for a given client, the more connections I am able to make for them. For example, I can write about notebooks for HP but I can also link their services and so on because of other projects I’ve done for them.
24. Get rostered. This is the key thing with big clients. Once you’re a rostered agency, it’s easy for new people inside big companies to hire you. If you have a unique and valuable service someone will find a way to add you to the roster of approved suppliers. Finding such a champion and offering such a service is the right way to go about it. Going via the purchasing department or as a subcontractor to another agency is a guaranteed way to slash your margins. In my experience, it also constrains your ability to do the kind of good work that the customer wants.
25. Find a flagship client. I was very lucky to be hired by Microsoft for a project early on. A flagship client is like a passport to other companies.
26. Find a better market. I used to do a lot of journalism. In many ways it was harder than the corporate writing I do now. For instance, I had to spend a lot of time developing and pitching stories.  Also, there was a lot of people who wanted to be freelance journalists so it didn’t pay very well. The biggest change in my life came when I decided that I didn’t want to play that game any more.  Instead of free-pitching magazine editors for badly-paid articles, I switched to a different market altogether.
27. Stuff that doesn’t work: In my experience lots of stuff doesn’t help: fancy business cards, brochures, mail shots, random cold calling, PR.

I just came across this speech transcript when I was writing an earlier post about managing geeks. I wrote it about a decade ago when I was running IG, a computer games company. I’m sure that I didn’t always practice what I preached but looking back some of the points still seem pretty valid.

Target Audience

The core audience for this talk include development managers, project leaders, and game designers - people on the boundaries of development and management.  A broader audience includes any involved in game development who is interested in the development process as a whole (rather than functional specialisations within it like programming or scheduling) and how they fit into it.

Introduction

Creativity is the hub around which this industry revolves. We need creativity to come up with original game ideas, of course, but it goes way beyond that. Creativity produces effective programming solutions, innovative game play, better user interfaces, cool special effects, efficient optimisations, ever-better graphics and, ultimately, more customer satisfaction and therefore sales.  My premise is that creative genius is absolutely vital for successful games but that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  My talk will be about the balance and boundaries between creativity and management.

Sources of Creativity

In descending order of utility, this is a list of the possible sources of creativity in development.

1. The team
2. In-house producers
3. Client producers
4. Outside experiences (books, conferences etc.)
5. The rest of the world and then…
6. … Management

At IG, we believe in the primacy of the team as the source of creative solutions to their development issues and in particular we hold to the belief that management should design games.  We have learnt this lesson through bitter experience but also by starting from the principles of empowering individuals and delegating responsibility as far down the system as possible.

Ways to Obstruct Creativity

People get into this business because they want to be creative.  It is easier to kill existing imagination than it is to encourage it.  Here are some classic ways to pour cold water on bright sparks:

• Ignoring people’s input - especially when management overrides it.
• Alienating team members by allowing dominant people to control the creative process.
• Allowing people who are not directly involved in the process to dominate it (this is particularly true of producers and clients) rather than inform it.
• Not providing a forum for debate and brain storming.
• No discipline for agreeing and recording decisions.
• The tyranny of the weak - “it can’t be done because….”
• Messing up hygiene factors, such as pay, appraisals, expenses, promotions etc.  These can be strong demotivators.

Above all, though, it is a question of confidence.  It is very easy to slip into negativity and hard to break out of it.  “We can destroy ourselves with cynicism and disillusion just as easily as with bombs” (Kenneth Clarke).

How to Encourage It

There are many proven ways for management to encourage creativity in a team environment.

• Notice it
• Regular team sanity checks
• Reward it
• Systematise it
• Request it
• Delegate it
• Build individual and team ownership

In managing creativity, one of the key tasks of a leader is to understand the problem space and help people define it and then work within it to solve the problem .  The list above are all examples of how this works in practice.  The abstraction and objectivity of a partial outsider helps put creative issues into context and can help the team match the right solutions to the right problems and avoid false trails.  

The Role of Motivation in Creativity

Management textbooks and studies show that recognition, ownership, and responsibility are key psychological motivators.  The role of management here is to build them into your development process and make sure that your management structure permits and encourages them.  One of the most challenging aspect of this for a manager is learning to let go - being freer with information and delegating precious responsibility.  I want to cover two aspects in more detail: building a creative environment and build structures that nurture creativity.

Building a Creative Environment

Everyone in the company has a responsibility to build a positive culture within the company, but generally management takes the lead and senior management often sets the tone for the whole company.  It is also important to remember that in rapidly growing companies, decisions made early grow in effect in proportion to the size of the company and are often very hard to reverse later.  This is a list of some attributes of a creative environment:

• Tolerance of honest mistakes - providing people learn from them.
• Good timely feedback - people shouldn’t be expected to mark their own exam papers.
• Giving experience a voice.  It’s easy in a young industry for people to believe they know ALL the answers.  Better to learn whatever you can from others rather than make the mistakes yourself.
• Mutual respect.
• Everyone has fun.  Fun builds teams, self confidence, communication, morale and respect.
• Commonly accepted high standards - creativity doesn’t mean anarchy or lower expectations.
• Open to suggestions.
• Forums and rituals for communication (e.g. team brainstorming)
• Effective team behaviour

The sum of all these parts is a philosophy we call ‘Team Democracy’.  It has all the attributes of real-world democracy - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to a vote and (for Americans, at least) the pursuit of happiness - but it also carries some of the responsibilities and disciplines.  For example, you have to participate, you have work within its rules and you have to accept and live by the decisions of a majority.  It is interesting to extend the analogy to the role of management - in a democracy, people look to leaders not dictators to help them achieve their goals.

Team Structure for Creativity

A producer is ultimately responsible for the project’s quality and timeliness as the most senior manager who deals with the project and team on a daily basis.  S/he deals with project management and personnel issues, provides an objective viewpoint onto the project, is the main interface for the project to the outside world and acts as a ‘court of appeal’ for the team.

At IG, an assistant producer is a team member responsible for scheduling, testing and other project related administrative issues.  They also act as team archivist and general factotum.  It is important for the team to see these roles as an integral part of the development process and not as an adversarial, alien imposition and for this reason we insist on a peer-to-peer relationship between assistant producers and the rest of the team.

Each project needs a team leader.  At IG, where the size of the project and the experience of the individual merit it; a project has a ‘project director’.  They are always team members with a constructive role on the project, either as an AP, an artist or programmer, and their role is to direct the creative process and share the projects vision.  They are the focus of the team democracy process acting as chairman rather than president, as befits their ‘first among equals’ status.  They are also responsible for team morale, setting standards and being a figurehead for the project outside the team.  It is a demanding, diffuse and challenging role but also one of the most satisfying when done properly.

Building a team along these lines, in our experience, can dramatically improve a team’s level of creativity. 

Conclusion

We have found that creativity, like a flame, cannot exist in a vacuum - it needs the oxygen of discipline and the spark of leadership to exist.  Management has a central role in building a creative company but for it to be effective it has to work with developers to define the boundaries of responsibility, to build bridges between disparate functions and to build a team structure and culture that supports disciplined creativity.

Alexander Kjerulf is in the category of people who wrote their own job description and then people took them seriously. The self-described Chief Happiness Officer is working on the same "Happy People" project at HP as me and I really like his blog.

Like me, he comes from an IT background. I think is why I enjoyed his post: How NOT to lead geeks so much. In summary:

1. Downplay training
2. Give no recognition (I used to write handwritten thank you letters to team members when products shipped, but I wished I had given more recognition generally.)
3. Plan too much overtime (I was very guilty of this back in the day)
4. Use management-speak (see my old posts The Devil’s Marketing Dictionary Part One, Part Two and Part Three)
5. Try to be smarter than the geeks
6. Act inconsistently
7. Ignore the geeks
8. Make decisions without consulting them
9. Don’t give them tools
10. Forget that geeks are creative workers

Another common problem in my experience is "two peoples divided by a common language".  I wrote about Geeks: how to write for a non-technical audience and (in the opposite sense) How to write like a hacker.

Just as management-speak is inspires cynicism in geeks, techno-speak inspires fear in managers. I’m thinking of writing a post on this. Does anyone have good examples? Any good suggestions for bridging the gap?

There’s an old joke about consultants: they borrow your watch to tell you the time. And then they keep the watch.

A few months ago, I wrote about When copywriting is not the answer. I just read a very interesting article by Steve Tobak on C/net about When to hire a consultant. It addresses some of the same issues.

He says that you should hire a consultant for:

1) expertise, 2) objectivity, 3) credibility, 4) leadership, and 5) time

I agree and the same things are true of writers (like me). Very often I get hired to break the status quo when marketing managers are unhappy with the quality of the copy that they get from bigger agencies but, ultimately, my ability to help them communicate better comes down to these five points.

I completely agree with his final point:

The bottom line: Just like with lawyers and doctors, working with consultants may be distasteful or even painful, but there are times when you need them if you know how to recognize those times. While trying to go it alone sounds noble or courageous, it isn’t. It can cost your company big-time.

If you were an experienced professional - say a lawyer or an accountant - and you received an email like the one below, you would probably find it somewhat insulting.

"Just draft a free contract and if we like it we might get you to sue someone." 

"Just do us a free audit and if it’s okay, we might ask for some tax advice."

What is it about the word "writer" that makes people think we’ll jump through hoops like performing seals to get our hands on a £50 gadget in order to get a gig that pays a fraction of our standard rate?

Company X emailed me out of the blue yesterday.  I sent them a carefully-worded pitch, sample prices and links to more information. This is the reply I just received:

We would like to thank you for your CV and portfolio.

After reviewing your CV/portfolio with our CEO we would like to propose the following, as we wish to work alongside an individual who we feel will be able to respond quickly and efficiently to our requests.

A sample of our product will be available for you to review and analyse.  We would then like you to provide us with a tantalising press release.  After each review these products would be yours to keep, the cost of each unit varies from £50.00 too £300.00.

In the first instance we would like to send you a [product name removed] for such a review.   After careful consideration of this review we will then make the decision as to whether we would wish to approach you with further work, which would also include proof reading of Deco Boxes, Specification Sheets and all other necessary marketing material.

We would need to work on a purchase order and invoice basis, each press release costing approximately £100.

We look forward to hearing your comments in regards to the above proposal.

In my experience, it takes a while to get to know a company and its products. This is a necessary first step to writing well for them. It also takes a day or two to write a good press release, get it approved and proofread. 

So, paying £100 per press release means, essentially, asking me to work for minimum wage. If I wanted to do that, I’d work for McDonald’s. At least I’d get a uniform and a free lunch.

I wrote a polite email saying that if they pay peanuts, they should expect monkeys. In my heart, I wanted to suggest that they do something painful and anatomically challenging to themselves. Writers are not monkeys.

Small businesses sometimes struggle with marketing.  They know they want the cure - more sales usually - but they don’t want to take the medicine. In my experience marketing embraces a range of disciplines and activities: branding, PR, advertising, websites, product literature, case studies etc. etc.

Copywriting touches all of these points but, on its own, it isn’t sufficient. I have worked with a couple of smaller companies who have had this problem. I’m good at what I do and I can help most businesses a lot. I’m good at prioritising and categorising product features and translating them into customer benefits.  I’m good a project management and understanding website development and magazine production. I’m really good at website copy, brochures and other long copy. But I can’t solve all their problems on my own.

I have a good track record, good clients, do good work and, yes, talk a good talk.  Small businesses sometimes see me as a kind of magic bullet.  What tends to happen next is that the projects start off with great enthusiasm but turn to disappointment when their expectations (usually unspoken) aren’t met.  Then they turn to the next magic bullet solution.  It’s expensive for them and frustrating for me.

The reality is that my work is best when it complements the work of other experts. Typically for my lovely, large clients like Microsoft, HP and eBay, I work with an ‘ecosystem’ of agencies and staff to deliver large projects.  My work infuses everyone else’s and their work builds on what I do.

I’ve had a few small business clients where everything went brilliantly (RiskCare’s website was one or case studies for a couple of small tech companies) but in those cases the brief is very specific.

The warning signs that a project is going to be a problem are:

• The absence of any coherent marketing plan or strategy, just “we need to sort out marketing.”
• Vague, non-specific briefs. Even if I draft a brief for them, there is sometimes an expectation that I’ll do “more” somehow.
• “Can we just book a day of your time?” as if that’s going to solve all their problems.
• Being asked to attend lots of meetings that don’t actually produce decisions or confirm briefs but just help them think through their troubles.
• When I’m asked to comment on or contribute to areas that aren’t really my primary expertise.
• Very long, rambling introductions to the company or its products. “The company was started in …” followed by a life story, as if the company’s history IS the company.  “ProductXYZ has…” followed by a two-hour super-technical presentation, as if the product IS the company.
• They want me to be a kind of surrogate marketing director.
• Time goes by, work is done but nothing changes.
• Vagueness about budgets, the process of purchasing (e.g. no purchase orders) or the business side of the engagement.
• Lots of free pitching from me and other agencies.
• I get a nagging feeling that I’m not really “deploying my full force along lines of excellence.” 

I guess this post is a long way of thinking through some of the factors that might cause me to suggest that a prospective client look for a different advisor or where I might want to do some education and pre-qualification before I work with a company. I know a few copywriters read this blog and I’m interested if this tallies with their experience.

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