One of the most common mistakes in marketing communications materials is forgetting to tell the reader, viewer, or listener what you want them to do. It happens all the time: someone crafts a brilliant, memorable message, but forgets to include some sort of instructions.
Do you want people to buy your product? Visit your website? If you don’t point them in the right direction, they’ll come up with a course of action on their own, and odds are good that it won’t be the one you intended.
I enjoy building things out of wood. Sometimes, I get lost in the power tool aisle, studying tremendously expensive pieces of equipment that do amazing things in the hands of skilled operators.
I could buy that equipment, too. But would owning and using it suddenly make me a skilled cabinetmaker? Would I be able to produce furniture like an artisan? Could I apply filigrees with the deft of a sculptor? Of course not. Despite my best intentions, what I produced would invariably end up looking something whacked together out of a couple sheets of plywood.
I was recently teaching a class about writing better business letters. With the advent of email and texting, letter writing is one of those arts that appears to be fading, and I welcomed the opportunity to share some basics.
One participant wondered about the best way to send letters. Is “sincerely” the right word?
Why do people choose to put so many things in quotation marks? I suspect that they believe wrapping a word or phrase in quotes somehow makes it more prominent or important, but it actually has the opposite effect.
Looking for a simple way to write more clearly and effectively? When you begin to write a letter, a memo, or an ad, start writing it to your mother.
Okay, it doesn’t have to be your mother. If you prefer, you could write to your best friend or your Aunt Agatha. The key is that you want to write to someone you know instead to of a faceless customer or peer.
I’ve learned that there are two timeless, foolproof secrets to success.
We all know that positive thinking is powerful. In fact, from an early age, we’re taught to put on a happy face no matter what happens. And, when I reference something that could be perceived as negative in copy, many clients are quick to request its replacement by something with a bigger smile.
That’s not always a good idea. Sometimes, what’s negative is far more impactful and communicative. For example, if your competition has been falsely suggesting that your product has a flaw that shortens its service life, hitting the misperception head-on is going to be infinitely more powerful than tiptoeing around it.
Thanks to email and the many other technological innovations that are now available, we communicate much more quickly. And, in our eagerness to fire off another message, sometimes we forget to take our time and do the things that were the norm with more archaic technologies such as typewriters.
I haven’t decided whether a choice of business location was an ironic accident or a stroke of marketing genius. While traveling through an Indiana city, I frequently pass a facility for a hospice and can’t help but notice the tenant sharing its building: a life insurance agent.
Way back when people used to compose something called “letters,” they often ended them with a brief afterthought called a postscript. If you’re too young to remember “duck and cover,” you may not have heard of these quaint messages, but they would begin with the abbreviation “P.S.”