Writing your own marketing material
Many of us have to write our own marketing material whether or not we enjoy writing. Often we’re so busy thinking about what we want to say that we lose sight of our audience. Even experienced writers can fall into this trap.
The problem with writing marketing material for ourselves is that we tend to waffle before we get to the point. Sam Leader, director and editor of Flying Solo, says that having edited some 600 articles for Flying Solo, she has “to get rid of an average of two or three warm-up paras time and time again”.
So how can we avoid this? I suggest you clarify your thoughts before you start writing by asking yourselves questions using PACKO: purpose, audience, context, key messages and outcome.
PurposeWhy are you writing this document? What do you want to achieve?
You may want to provide information, make a recommendation to solve a problem or persuade your readers to buy your products or services. Sometimes you may have more than one purpose.
Understanding your purpose helps determine the structure of your writing. For example, if you’re writing an informative piece, you can often get straight to the point without much preamble. You simply record your information in order of importance to the reader.
If you want to persuade your readers, you may need to spend more time setting the scene to demonstrate that you understand their situation. The challenge is to write from their point of view, not yours.
Audience/sHaving established what you want to achieve, think about your audience/s. What do you know about them? Are your writing for single or multiple audiences?
The more you tailor your writing to suit your readers, the more powerful it will be. As Cicero said:
If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.
ContextI never used to think about context, but I have become increasingly aware that many writers make assumptions about their readers’ knowledge when writing marketing material. Explaining the context or background may not always be relevant, but if you think about it, you’ll know whether or not you need to explain your terms or include some background information.
For example, at the end of 2008, the media covered how Bernard Madoff lost his clients a lot of money through a Ponzi scheme. Many newspapers did not explain what a Ponzi scheme is, leaving readers to guess or look up the information. (According to Wikipedia: “It’s a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors out of the money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit.”)
Key messagesWhat are your key messages?
You must be able to articulate your key messages in clear statements that even a 12-year-old can understand.
This sounds common sense, but it’s amazing how many highly intelligent writers don’t make their key messages clear. I think it’s sometimes because they think they’re obvious. Professor Chip Heath of Stanford University calls this the “curse of knowledge”.
Outcome/sHow do you want your readers to respond? This question relates back to purpose, but thinking about it separately reminds you to check your details.
For example, a friend of mine, who owns a restaurant, sends a wonderful chatty email to customers. A recent email was as interesting as usual, but she’d forgotten to include the restaurant’s phone number. Had she thought: “bookings, bookings, bookings”, the phone number would have been prominently displayed.
So before you start writing marketing material next time, just pause for a moment and ask yourself the PACKO questions.
This article first appeared on www.flyingsolo.com.au
Labels: business writing, marketing, writing
Writing recommendations
It sounds basic to ask for what you want when you're writing a recommendation, but a common complaint I hear is that many recommendations are too vague.
I think the problem is twofold. First, I think we often get so immersed in the detail we fail to stand back and see the bigger picture. This happens to all of us at times and it often helps to talk to someone not involved in your project or else try writing a summary paragraph and then a summary sentence.
The second problem is the wording of the recommendation and knowing how much detail to include. In my opinion, a recommendation should be sufficiently detailed to stand alone, i.e. make sense without the accompanying text. For example, a recommendation to lease office premises in Brisbane should propose a lease at X site for three years for $y with a maximum fitout cost of $z.
Such recommendations can then be copied and pasted into the minutes as resolutions and everyone will have the same understanding of their meaning. The person who has the responsibility to follow up understands their responsibilities, and the resolution is also a historical and legal record.
So next time you write a recommendation ask yourself:
- Is it clear what I am asking for?
- Is it sufficiently detailed (but not too detailed)?
- Does it make sense without the accompanying text?
- Will it stand the test of time if taken out of context?
- Is it clearly and concisely written?
Labels: recommendations, writing
Creating flow between paragraphs
One way of creating flow between paragraphs is by telling your readers something ‘old’ before you tell them something ‘new’. By telling your readers what they already know (as long as you’re not too long and boring about it), you engage their interest. They agree with what you’ve written and so are receptive to what you have to say next.
Great speech makers use this technique of ‘old before new’ to great effect. Martin Luther King began his ‘I have a dream’ speech by talking about the indisputable past before moving to talk about the present.
‘Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
‘But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of the American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.’
I got this idea from a new Australian book on business writing — Writing at Work by Neil James. It's an excellent book.
Applying the ‘old before new’ technique to a work situation, a writer was seeking approval to trial a new waste management technology. Before talking about the proposed trials, which would cost a considerable amount of money, the writer described preliminary trials that indicated the technology had great potential.Labels: paragraphs, writing
Visual aspects of paragraphs
We all make instant decisions about how easy a document will be to read based on visual cues. Paragraph length is one of the most important cues. Long, dense paragraphs scream 'difficult to read'.
Short plus variety
Most of your paragraphs in business and government writing should be fairly short, but you also need variety because if all your paragraphs are the same length they look monotonous. Varying the length of your paragraphs gives them greater rhythm.You can occasionally have a one-sentence paragraph for emphasis.
Word stacks
We sometimes get a particular word or phrase on our mind or maybe we have a term we have to repeat for clarity. Whichever is the case, you need to make sure that the words or phrases don't land on top of each other in sentences that are close to each other.
You also need to vary the words you use to start new paragraphs. For example, if every paragraph starts with I, your eyes are drawn to that word. You have to change your word order to avoid this.
Widows and orphans
If you split a paragraph after the first line at the bottom of a page or column, this single line is known as an 'orphan'. When the last line of a paragraph is at the top of a new page, it is called a 'widow'. Orphans and widows disrupt the flow of a document. Sometimes the flow is also disrupted by a single word on the last line of a paragraph. Labels: paragraphs, writing
Use specific language for clarity
Specific words are precise and clear. On the other hand, generic words, sometimes known as ‘fat’ or ‘fuzzy’ words, can be vague and ambiguous. At best, they are meaningless, at worst, they are misleading.
Some examples of fuzzy words are:- communication (what type of communication?)
- deal with, handle (how?)
- profound, significant, deep, extensive, intensive (by what measure?)
- in a timely manner, recently (when?)
- experts say (what experts?)
- research shows (what research?)
In ?owerful Questions, Christo Norden-Powers urges writers to be very critical and wary of fuzzy words. One example he gives is two sentences from an internal National Australia Bank (NAB) market risk report in November 2003. This report to an executive committee was written several months before the bank’s Forex trading losses of $360 million were made public. The NAB’s losses were associated with rogue trading, where trades were made outside the bank’s guidelines over a period of time.
"At the time of writing, [Global Markets Division] trading operations continue to manage risk responsibly in changing market conditions. Adherence to risk discipline is good."
Christo Norden-Powers takes these sentences apart and questions what words and phrases mean. For example, he asks questions such as: What trading operations specifically are you referring to? Which market conditions are changing? How specifically are they changing? What specifically are you doing to manage those changing conditions responsibly?
Labels: specific words, writing
Everyday words aren't always the best
Familiar everyday words aren't always the best choice. In most cases they are, but sometimes an unfamiliar word is more precise or has more impact.
Precise unfamiliar words may be more concise'Albedo' is an unfamiliar word, but if you were writing about climate change or the landscape it could be a very useful term as it means the amount of sunlight reflected back by a portion of the earth.
Unfamiliar words may have more impact'Woolly' thinking is a more common phrase than 'flocculent' thinking yet Winston Churchill, who was a great fan of simple words, used the expression 'flocculent thinking'. According to Sir Ernest Gowers, author of The Complete Plain Words, 'flocculent' conveys an extra ounce of contempt "perhaps because the combination of 'f' and 'l' so often expresses an invertebrate state, as in flop, flap, flaccid, flimsy, flabby and filleted".
New words creep into our language all the timeThe above examples both come from an interesting article by James Meek. But I started thinking about this topic when someone in a writing course suggested that we're dumbing down our language by using familiar words.
I'm not sure I agree as we're so inventive with our language. New words in the Macquarie Dictionary this year include: credit card tart, tanorexia, salad dodger, floordrobe, silent disco, Chindia and carbon footprint.
I bet you don't know them all! Their meanings: credit card tart = someone who transfers a loan from one account to another; tanorexia = skin tan obsession; salad dodger = an obese person; floordrobe = my son's bedroom floor; silent disco = dancers wearing headphones to eliminate noise pollution; Chindia = India and China; carbon footprint = our carbon dioxide emission impact on the environment.
New phrases include 'the green shoe brigade' (groups who cash in on environmental concerns in a dubious way), 'arse antlers' (tattoo just above the bum) and 'man flu' (man with a minor cold who exaggerates the symptoms).
ReferencesJames Meek, 'From albedo to zugunruhe', Guardian newspaper, Dec 07, http://tinyurl.com/2g3zsaErnest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, http://tinyurl.com/26ackhTony Stephens, 'Linguists put the shine on Strine', SMH, http://tinyurl.com/26wy7jLabels: everyday words, precise words, writing
