Using “verbal sketching” for improved copy

I recently spoke at the Commpose Copywriter’s Meetup in Phoenix, AZ about using a chaotic form of brainstorming—something I call “verbal sketching”—to help craft strong and persuasive self-promotional copy.

Most people hate to write about themselves or their business. This includes those in the creative industry and those in other industries.

So why writing about yourself so hard to do?

The fact is that you know all of the facets of yourself or your business and it gets REALLY hard to narrow down what you want to say and what type of ‘voice’ you should say it in.

Additionally, writing for yourself is a challenge because we so rarely have the time to write when we are truly feeling passionate about our business—we’re too busy working on paying the bills. Then, once we manage the schedule the time to do our own self-promotional work you know you probably aren’t going to be filled with that fire that you were a month ago when you were swamped with work.

Over the years I have crafted a system that helps me to write passionately about my business on command. Everyone who knows me knows I’m rediculously organized, almost to the point of OCD. My “verbal sketching” system is completely unlike me. However, it frees me up to be completely creative without boundaries of organizational structure, timelines or topics.

So just how does this “verbal sketching” work?

Well, what I do is write down every copy idea that could be something. And I mean everything. Even if you think you know what you want to say, if you just let your ideas flow out of your, you never know what kind of greatness can result.

Collect and file all of your snippets of ideas away. I tend to collect ideas and brainstorm for months before I make use of these ideas. This can be in a shoebox, file folder, etc.—whatever works for you. Some people might even choose to do this digitally—I, however, prefer the raw creativity of paper. For me, the physical act of writing lets me be free and creative and come up with awesome bits of new ideas. When I write digitally, I always feel I need to “finish” my writing, rather than just leave it as a collection of ideas. However, for those who are ok with incomplete digital docs, other methods, such as a private “diary” blog you post random thoughts to via your cell, or even a big ole’ Google doc could work great.

SIDE NOTE: I always keep notepads handy. I have them on my nightstand, my desk (both at home and at work), in the car, in my purse, etc. Our brains are usually the most creative when they are relaxed—I can’t even begin to tell you how much of the copy on my website was conceived just as I was trying to fall asleep.

Now, you are probably asking yourself how this all comes together.

Once I feel I have compiled a significant amount of ideas and notes I find a good time to go through them and start making sense of them. I compile everything into a Word document. Always include everything—you don’t need to worry about it all making sense yet.

Once I have all of the ideas compiled digitally, I go back through all of the ideas and start grouping like items together. At this point I probably should mention that I usually have a good idea of what kinds of copy I need to create (i.e. home page copy, bio copy, etc.). If you don’t know what kind of copy you need, you probably should consider these items before you start compiling your notes and ideas together.

Once I have all of my ideas grouped with like ideas, I start stringing thoughts together to form cohesive copy. Of course you will need to add some filler copy in addition to your ideas, but these ideas are likely to hold a lot of passionate thoughts and you will probably only need to add come additional copy to link them together. As you are writing your copy, don’t feel you must include everything at this point. It is natural that you will have ideas that don’t fit with the rest of your ideas, or time you were writing with an unfitting voice.

Now that you are done…

Ha! Lets just say I am never done. I have an ever-evolving set of idea files and am always storing copy ideas for the future. You and your business will continue to grow, so you have to be aware of this and be planning for improving your marketing copy.

So, how would you use this method?

To me, this method is best-used for self-promotion copy—the quality of the copy should be of utmost importance to you, yet you probably have the least amount of time to devote to writing for yourself.

However, this method could also be used for other kinds of writing. It is most conducive to a writing project that has time to evolve, since it relies heavily on having time to brainstorm. It seems it could be great for blog-writing and book-writing.

Strictly for startups: Why market? Why now?

Heinz Ketchup by Caitlinator on Flickr

I have a younger brother who insists that Hunt’s Ketchup is better than Heinz. He would go on and on when he was forced to eat Heinz Ketchup on his hot dog or hamburger. Many years ago, my mom and I decided to test out whether he REALLY knew the difference. So one night at the dinner table, we performed a little taste-test. I squeezed out a dollop of Heinz and a dollop of Hunt’s Ketchup onto a paper plate, and wrote their respective names on the underside of the plate. We had him give both brands a try, and I’m sure you know what is coming next—he chose the wrong one. That’s right, he thought the Heinz tasted better than the Hunt’s brand. He insisted we cheated, we insisted he never knew what he was talking about.

The fact is, the kid had an unshakable partiality to the Hunt’s brand. Such a partiality that he couldn’t even fess up to actually liking the other brand better.

Consumers minds work this way too. They acquire a strong affinity (or conversely, a disgust) towards a specific brand of product or service. And once that opinion is formed, it is pretty tough to change their minds. No matter how many facts or features you offer them.

This is why it is important to market your brand strong from the start. Even the smallest of companies can do this. It starts with solidly defining what you stand for and sticking to it. From there, you build the look of the brand (designers will call this your “brand identity”) so that it reinforces your mission.

As the ketchup story demonstrates, a poor impression of your company may never be able to be reversed. This is why it’s absolutely vital to make a long-term investment in your new company and seek professional marketing help at the very beginning of your business.

Twitter in a nutshell

Chances are you have heard about Twitter. If you are like most people, you might not really understand what the “point” of all this twittering is.

Twitter, in a nutshell, is micro-blogging. Short 140-character posts. Some people also call it life-casting. Twitter often gets a bad rap that its participants are just broadcasting the mundane details of their lives. Although these descriptions hold truth, Twitter is really so much more than this. Twitter is really all about interaction and building relationships. In fact, a lot of self-employed people use it just to feel like they are connected to a world outside of their home office. Twitter is about getting involved in conversations with people you follow, sharing information, ideas and often a laugh.

Lets go over a few Twitter terms:

•  Follower: When you decide you want to be able to see what someone is saying on Twitter, you follow them. You don’t have to know someone to follow them, and in most cases they don’t have to “approve” you following them. Likewise, people can follow you as well. They can be people you really know or complete strangers.

•  Tweet: A tweet is a post. It consists of a 140-character message of your choosing.

•  Retweet: This is when you re-post something someone else said. The benefit of this is that you are passing on a message from someone you follow to the people who follow you. Great content spreads quickly like this.

•  At-reply: When you want to direct a message at one someone, you include their Twitter handle, which includes the “@ sign” followed by their username. When you do this, the user will be notified that you referenced them in one of your tweets.

•  Direct Message: A direct message is essentially like a 140-character email message within Twitter. This form of communicating in Twitter is private.

•  Tweeting or Twittering: The act of posting tweets.

A few things you should know before getting started with Twitter:
The #1 thing to know: Everything you post is public to the world. Don’t get overly freaked about this, but its something to always have in mind. You don’t want to give TOO much information about yourself or say something that could be potentially used negatively against you at some point in time. It IS possible to protect your account so that it can only be viewed with your permission, but honestly, this goes against everything that Twitter is about.

The #2 thing to know: Be authentic. Since Twitter is all about relationship-building, it makes no sense to try to build relationships from a false persona. For this reason, businesses can have a hard time embracing Twitter, because it doesn’t work when it is confined to too many rules. Twitter is all about being Ed the Software Developer who works at ABC Labs, not ABC Labs, the cold, unidentifiable Twitter presence. Twitter was made for people. It is possible to “work your business” on Twitter, but it’s really done best through being yourself. Mix up your tweets: talk a little business, talk a little about you, comment on other people’s conversations and share knowledge that your followers would appreciate.

The #3 thing to know: Twitter is not nearly as good without a third-party app. It’s really inconvenient to have to log on to Twitter.com to post or check your account. For the most part it doesn’t really notify you that you have been referenced in a tweet or if people are retweeting your messages. You will ideally want to use what is called a third-party app—an application that you can install to monitor and participate in Twitter right from your desktop or mobile phone. Two of the most popular applications are Tweetie and Tweetdeck.

Once you get on Twitter you will need to complete your 160-character bio and upload some sort of avatar. Make sure you upload an avatar, as most people don’t think you are serious about Twitter if you don’t even bother to upload an avatar. If using your Twitter for any type of professional purpose, make sure to note your profession in some way. But feel free to pepper your profile with some personal tidbits as well. Authenticity is key!

Before you really get going with Twitter, you may wish to join and follow a few interesting people and just kind-of observe how other people are using Twitter. As the creators of Twitter have said: There is no wrong way to use Twitter. Each person uses it a little differently as they see fit. For more information about getting started, you can read the Twitter 101 section on the Twitter website.

So you are probably wondering how you find interesting people to follow. One of the easiest ways is to just use the “Find People” feature on twitter.com. You can search by name or by keyword, although this feature can be just a bit buggy. There are also some other websites that allow you to search for users, but you can discover those in time as you become more familiar with Twitter.

When using Twitter effectively, you can really connect with people you never would have. Because of Twitter, I know dozens more creatives than I ever would have before, have become much more involved in the design community and have learned about tons of new websites, resources and technologies. If you are thinking that Twitter is just another time-suck, you are probably right, but if you manage your participation well it can have great benefits. If you log on and try it out, make sure you follow me at @melissabalkon. Happy Twittering!

To niche or not to niche

I was recently talking with some other creatives about establishing a niche market for themselves. The topic was met with mixed feelings. Following the meeting, I began thinking more about the concept of working within a niche and had a few thoughts to share. I have been listening to the Marketing Mentor Podcast for some time now, and its creators tirelessly promote the need to specialize your services towards a specific market. One of the things that I have learned from this podcast is that a niche market can be defined in many ways. When people hear the term niche-market they generally think of industry specialization. However, having a niche doesn’t have to be defined this way. You can look at your specialization from many angles: by industry, by service type, by voice, by demographic, etc.

Take my business for example: at Strong Design Studios, we specialize in working with small businesses who desire a polished image. Everything we do is focused around this mission: our service, timelines, pricing, and the value that we build into our service. Thats the benefit of having a niche—you can tailor your services so that you can become a resource your market depends on. It tooks some time for Strong Design Studios to get to this point, but over the past years we’ve finally learned that we just love to work with little businesses and help them use their resources to create a strong face for their business. However, a small design firm like Strong Design could have taken several other approaches: they could be the design firm known for working in a specific business sector, the firm who only works with high-end clientele, the firm known for their logo designs, or the firm known for working in a grungy style—they could even be positioned as the ‘cheap firm’ or the ‘fast firm’ or even the ‘slow and tedious’ firm. Likewise, you can (and should) determine your niche market, but don’t feel like you must fall into the obvious categories.

To help you starting thinking ‘out of the box’ you might wish to pick up a copy of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing or even Made to Stick—two books that touch on how to define your business in different ways.

As Al Ries and Jack Trout explain in their book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, people only remember businesses that are first—or maybe second—in a category. Those businesses become known as the category. This is the benefit of creating a niche. When someone starts speaking of your niche, you want them to immediately thing of you. Of course, you probably have much more than one other competitor, which is why it is important to determine which nuances of your business keep your customers coming back and set you apart from your competitors. As Ries and Trout continue to say in their book: “if you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.” It doesn’t matter how small of a business you are. Think about the little things that make you different. You may be one of 50 lumber supply companies in the metro area, but you may be the only one that offers same-day, free delivery. And thats a difference that probably keeps your customers coming back time and time again.

My point is that I vote for specialization. Narrowing down a niche for your business is a really positive thing. If you are just beginning your business, developing your niche is a process that can take some time—determining not only your passion but what you excel at and can profit from doesn’t usually happen overnight. While uncovering your niche helps you reveal who you are as a business, this process will also help you be able to better market and explain your niche to potential clientele. And clients are drawn to a clear-headed, focused service provider.

What Breakfast at Tiffany’s can teach you about your brand

If you haven’t seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s, let me give you a quick recap. A young woman named Holly is living it up in New York City when she encounters a new neighbor in her building. The man’s name is Paul Varjack, yet Holly insists on calling him ‘Fred,’ as he bears a striking resemblance to her brother by that name, and she continually introduces him to all her friends as ‘Fred.’ Holly and Paul share many adventures, and as you might have guessed, Paul falls for Holly. Now, the basis of this post has less to do with the overall plot of the movie, but rather more to do with one simple conversation Paul has with Holly’s former agent, O.J. Berman.

Out of desperation, Paul calls O.J. for help when Holly lands in jail. The beginning of the call goes something like this:

Paul: “Hello, O.J., this is Paul Varjack. V-A-R-J-A-C-K.”

OJ: “Who?”

Paul: “It’s Paul Varjack. V-A-R-J-A-C-K.”

OJ: “Who?”

Paul: “Paul Varjack. V-A-R…. it’s Fred!”

OJ: “Oh hey there, Fred, how are you doing!”

Watching this clip made me think of how so many companies think of their “brand.” Lately it seems we have been seeing many organizations who have decided they need to ‘brand’ or ‘rebrand’ themselves. To do this, many go through a process of deciding how they want people to see them, and then try to shove that impression down their customers’ throats. However, their loyal following may actually know and value them for an entirely different reason. Basically these companies  keep trying to associate themselves with the name ‘Paul,’ when their clientele has only ever known them as is ‘Fred.’

Branding is important but, as Marty Neumeier says in his book, The Brand Gap: “A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.” Listen to your customers and stay true to what they value you for. Present yourself with the name—or brand—they already know you by.

Build your business to innovate

I quick little video of Guy Kawasaki explaining the 10 steps to innovation. There are some powerful concepts here. Oh, and if the video gets stuck around 2:25 just forward it a little to see the rest.

Would you try to barter with your grocer?

Most people would never consider trying haggle their local retailers on, say, the cost of paper towel, but why do creatives and agencies often experience this phenomenon? The following video clip illustrates this concept in a pretty hilarious way:

When going over a quote from your design agency, please remember the many hours of design that will be put into your project, as well as hard operating costs such as education, hardware and software that is invested by your design agency in order to make your project happen. Happy marketing!

The Coolest Christmas Card I’ve Ever Seen!

Has anyone else seen this sweet holiday card sent our by VW? I just stumbled on it, and wanted to share it with everyone. Enjoy the design awesomeness!

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Remember that song from Sesame Street… one of these things is not like the other….

I was reading an article today regarding our new president’s campaign branding and that song began playing through my mind. I couldn’t shake the question of what would happen if a beautiful brand comprised of a series of seamless items, were soured by one or more misfitting members.

I noodled on the concept of branding and I realized there was a simple illustration on how branding ought to work.

The essential concept of branding is to unify the entire user experience behind your brand concept —from visual representation, to customer service interaction, to corporate dynamic. Each facet of your company SHOULD mimic the values of all of the others.

So many people are alluded by the concept of a brand. They think it is their logo, their tagline, or their corporate colors. While these are great places to start, a well-crafted brand is so much more than those items. A cohesive brand should leak into every crevice of a business. From the design of your logo, print, packaging or web communications, the technique of your photography, the mission of the organization, the style of your copy, the tone of your customer service interactions all the way down to the atmosphere within your corporate facilities. However, a brand is much more than skin-deep. 

On top of all this, know that your brand is not always what YOU say it is. Your clientele plays a huge part in the definition of your brand. After all, without them, you are dead in the water. You may want to position yourself as one thing, but your sales reports and customer feedback are saying something different. Your customer has an enormous amount of say in “who” your company is, because they are what keep it alive. Brand consistency instills trust with your clientele—they know what they can expect from your brand. If you start shifting things around, your risk rattling your customers’ trust right over to your competitor.

Since small businesses rarely have the money to hire out to a major brand agency to manage the gamut of details, they need to work extra hard themselves to carefully define and then execute their brand. As small businesses often work with many different vendors on their marketing efforts, it is imperative that the business owner or marketing manager clearly communicate their brand’s values to all parties involved and encourage collaboration to produce the strongest, most brand-centric result. 

Some may say that small businesses can’t build a strong brand, that it takes a bigger budget than they will ever have. But branding your business doesn’t need to cost an exorbitant amount of money. Planning and simplicity are the key. Don’t fall prey to the notion that just because you don’t have a huge ad budget you can’t keep your brand consistent and professional.

For a really great read on branding try “The Brand Gap” by Marty Neumeier.

Just Grab That Image Off My Website…

Ahh the famous phrase used by clients everywhere. A friend of mine passed on this silly cartoon that finds humor in this phrase often-uttered by my print clients. It inspired me to write a little explanation of exactly why using web images isn’t a good practice. Bear with me, this one might take a second…

All photographic images (including all website images) are created of hundreds of pixels. These pixels are incredibly small and should be completely invisible to the naked eye when you are viewing an image at full size. However, if you were to zoom in very closely on a digital image you could see each pixel and how each one’s color slowly shifts to provide optical illusions of smooth color transitions that make up your photo.

Back to the moral of the cartoon. The bottom line of this issue is that web images are created in 72 or 96dpi (because web browsers view at this resolution) and print images are created in 300dpi. When a print designer is asked to take an image from a website, it must be scaled up from 72dpi to 300dpi, which essentially means each pixel will be enlarged to three times its original size. This creates a “pixelization” effect. Pixelation appears because the pixels that make up the image have been enlarged so much that you are now actually starting to see each one individually and the smooth optical illusion breaks down. The information in the image has essentially been stretched to such a degree that there are now gaps, and no amount of “photoshopping” can supplement this lost information. Because the pixels are now over-sized, pixelated images will appear blurry in print, which does very little to enforce the professionalism of your organization.

My recommendation to all individuals who are involved in coordination of print design is to always make sure you always keep a copy of the native, high resolution image files on your hard drive or on a back-up disc. This way, when your you or your designer needs high-resolution images, you will be able to access them quickly and easily.