Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

Business Writing

Copywriters? We don’t need no stinking copywriters!

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You have a new product or service ready to go and a new website to market it.

Perhaps this product is going to be the very foundation of your new business.

Budgets are tight, of course. You’ve already shelled out for site design, the build, the hosting, the payment gateway, and the t-shirts. However much you believe the copy for your site is crucial, you’ve convinced yourself there’s no budget left for a copywriter.

Don’t panic. The steps you need to take to make a successful first impression with your writing are few.

Six, in fact.

Six straightforward steps. Here they are:

  1. Grab
  2. Convince
  3. Get to the point
  4. Convince again
  5. Tell them what to do next
  6. Don’t blow it

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Grab

This is the headline. (You probably worked that out for yourself.)

I call it grab to distinguish it from holler. Many people think the purpose of a headline is to attract as many people as possible. They look at a headline as a way of shouting in a crowd.

Nope.

The purpose of a headline is simply to tell people who are already interested that they’ll find more information below. Don’t waste time trying to attract an audience of big game hunters for mouse traps.

In other words, don’t be ambiguous, don’t be clever, and don’t be funny. (Unless you’re selling jokes, of course, but even then, it had better be a good one.) If you’re going to shout in a crowd, you need to know the name of the person whose attention you’re trying to attract.

Claude C. Hopkins – the patron saint of advertising copy – puts it as succinctly as this:

Address the people you seek, and them only.

Your headline serves the simple purpose of telling interested customers that what they’re looking for is about to be revealed.

Convince

You’ve promised something with your headline. Now you need to convince your eager audience that you can deliver.

The trick here is to exude authority. And, for most visitors to your site, this will be about the structure of your copy as much as the words. They want to be able to scan the page and be reassured that they’re going to learn what they need to.

This may sound like a design decision but it’s also to do with the way you use sub-headings and paragraph sizes.

If you can embed a testimonial or two in this section, that is a great way to back up your credentials.

Words are important, too, of course. And it’s crucial that you use the right words. Too technical, too “selly sell” (as Chris Brogan might say), too pompous, too simple – all carry their own dangers.

The tone of voice and the vocabulary and the way the words march down and across your page all combine to convince – or otherwise – that you and your product are the real deal and that you understand your target audience.

Get to the point

There’s a time and a place for telling your life story, explaining the reasons for that year spent trekking across Central Asia, and how and why you got the idea for the wonderful product you’re now presenting to a lucky audience.

This, however, is not the time nor the place.

You’ve grabbed your potential customers with a great headline and convinced them that you can deliver what they’re looking for. So, now is the time to follow through, to push your advantage, and to reinforce their sense they’re in the right place.

That means, tell them what they need to know. Now. Quickly.

Explain who the product is for and who it is not for. Tell them how quickly they can have it and what happens if they want more.

If there are caveats to share, share them now. Nobody will be grateful to you for making them stay longer than they need to.

By the end of this section your prospects should be desperate to know exactly how their lives will improve when they buy what you are offering. And that’s what you do next.

Convince again

Time to convince again. This time, however, the convincing is on behalf of the product and not you or your company.

This is where you explain how your product or service will meet or exceed the expectations of your customer. (This is not where you talk about you and your company and how smart you are and how the way you do things is better than the competition.)

Avoid the word ‘we’ as much as possible. For each ‘we’, make sure there are at least ten instances of ‘you’. Seriously. Your customer wants to know how the product helps them, not how it makes you feel.

You know the prospect is interested because they have come this far. Now is the time to drill home the benefits. Will it save them money? Will it make their lives easier? Will it make them more attractive (even in their own imagination)?

Tell them what to do next

Get the previous steps right and your call to action (“CTA”, as we marketing copywriters say when we hang out at those wild, marketing copywriter get-togethers) should be almost unnecessary. Almost.

Although your prospects should already be itching to take action, they need to know exactly what that action is.

You need to tell them.

Unless you tell them explicitly what you want them to do next – call, email, click the ‘buy now’ button, juggle with small animals – they will spend one or two moments wondering how to continue and, if the answer is not obvious, move on.

However well you’ve written the preceding sections, if your CTA is missing, you’re losing business. Period.

Don’t blow it

You’ve done all this work and your product/sales page is looking good.

You’ve grabbed your prospects, you’ve given them all the reasons they need to buy from you, and you’ve told them what to do next. Surely, that’s all that’s required? Is there really a final step?

Yes. But this final step is not a section you need to write. Instead, it’s a form of review – or editing. This is where you pick up the crusty food remnant on the silver service cutlery, the dodgy stain on the crisp white sheets in your luxury hotel room, the dubious hair on the fluffy towel, the…. you get the picture.

In short, this is where you make sure your readers don’t find out that you don’t know the difference between “their” and “there” and “they’re”, “its” and “it’s”, “your” and “you’re”, or even “discreet” and “discrete”.

Spellcheckers don’t help here, as you will discover.

Evidence of poor grammar or poor spelling may not affect the quality of your product or service but it can suddenly put a doubt in the mind of your potential customer. For the first time, they may wonder whether the lack of care taken on the page may reflect a lack of care elsewhere.

This is not worth the risk. Check and double-check what you’ve written. Read it aloud and get someone else to go over it, too.

Congratulations

That’s it. You’ve written a page that works. Visitors are staying, they’re signing up, and your product is selling well.

Time to start on your next page.

This Post’s Title

One of my favourite films is Treasure Of The Sierra Nevada, directed by John Huston and starring – among others – Humphrey Bogart. The image at the top is from the film. At one point in the film a group of bandits claiming to be lawmen accosts the main characters. They main characters demand to see badges. The lead bandit responds with a burst of righteous indignation, laced with invective. His response has, over time, been reduced to the much shorter misquotation of “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”

The picture itself comes from an interview extract with John Huston.

So there you go.

Talking In One Direction Is Not A Conversation

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(That’s ‘in’ One Direction, not ‘about’ One Direction.)

A conversation is the best way to discover how to help someone.

In Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do (see my review of the book), Euan Semple gives over a whole chapter to the notion of conversations only being possible between equals – an insight he attributes to David Weinberger.

If you currently work in a traditional hierarchical workplace, this notion might strike you as patently wrong. However, that would reflect a misunderstanding of what is meant by ‘conversation’, especially in the era of the social web. Conversation is not a simple exchange of words. For instance, the following are not conversations:

  1. Asking your bank manager for a loan
  2. Responding to the inquiries of a police officer
  3. Telling your doctor where the pain is
  4. Explaining to your boss how you sent the customer the wrong order

You may have conversations at some time with each of those people but it won’t be when they are assuming their ‘superior’ position and you your nominally ‘inferior’ one.

Much business writing – and marketing material and the content found in customer support channels, especially – defaults to a position of superiority. The business takes on an almost paternalistic role of talking down. We know our products and we know best how to use them and what they can do to make your life better. You can see how that approach would lead to messaging that is distant, pompous, and aloof. There’s little chance of any information flowing back up that channel of talking down.

Like one of those letters you get from your credit card company, for instance.

Empathy is a good place to start. And add a dose of humility. Carry those into your writing and your engagement with colleagues, customers, and your social networks and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself getting more than you give. For open thing, empathy and humility tend to help you listen more. Then you learn more and find better ways to help others, whether that’s with advice, a product, or a service. And when you listen and help, you’re heard and helped in turn.

It sounds like magic. But you know it’s not.

When I used to read stories to my children at bed time, the stories always worked best when I read them as if I were as excited and interested and surprised by what happened as my son or daughters. If I read the stories as an ‘adult’, as someone who felt the stories slightly beneath my intellectual or emotional intelligence, the children grew bored. As bored as I was.

This withdrawal from genuine connection is what happens with a lot of business writing; huge swathes of company Facebook pages are a great example of this, where ‘conversation’ is limited to pressing the Like button and the marketing department think they’ve truly engaged with their customer base because they had extra ‘likes’ on that last passionless and redundant post.

It’s often fear, I believe, that prevents us from engaging people with our real voices. Fear and the habits ingrained in us. Too often, we feel we need permission to be genuine. That might be the permission of our boss, of the legal department, of the marketing department. As soon as those considerations tiptoe into the edges of our consciousness, we’re doomed to look for a one-sided interchange: to glean information or to dispense it. It’s a one-shot interaction and no conversation is possible.

This fear often stems from the very fact that true business conversations are rare. That’s one of the habits we internalise. We expect to adopt the superior or inferior position, depending on whether we’re buying or selling or advising or seeking help. Social tools are starting to break this habit. Powerfully and, I’m pleased to say, quite quickly. This is one of the reasons that large companies have been slow to adopt their widespread use, especially across the boundaries of the organisation.

If you’re in such an organisation, preempt the adoption of the tools and reach out yourself. Find like minds within the company and set up conversations with your peers. (Check out the ideas that Anne Marie McEwan of The Smart Work Company is developing for the workplace.)

And if it’s a conversation, that’s because everyone involved is your peer.

Writing In Collaboration

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In a goody bag I picked up at one of the excellent Like Minds breakfast events, there was a Harvard Business Review booklet called Life’s Work. It’s a collection of short interviews with ‘wildly successful people’. I’m not sure what the Harvard Business Review definition of a wildly successful person is. It must be the opposite of the domesticated version, I guess.

The first interview in the book is with Ai Weiwei, the wildly successful Chinese multimedia artist. And person, of course. Here is the exchange that stuck me.

Ai Weiwei

You often work collaboratively. Why?
I think I can be creative only in a group. It’s all about the communication. It can help you build something that would not exist if you were working separately. It’s not just one plus one but something more.

When I work with clients who are writing books, they often tell me that not only does the writing become easier when they know I will be editing and cutting and making suggestions but that it also becomes more fun.

Not ‘more fun’ because I wear silly hats for Skype calls or hand out sweets at meetings but more enjoyable because working with someone else is generally more stimulating and feels less pressured. In the days when I thought I might be a TV scriptwriter, I discovered that working with a writing partner made the blank page far less terrifying. It’s like creeping downstairs to the basement in the dark knowing your best friend is beside you. (It also means that, according to the old chestnut, if something nasty lurches out of the darkness towards you, you only need to be able to run faster than your friend.)

In short – bringing us back up from the basement and into the light – it can free your creativity to be working with someone else.

This is not the creativity of the brainstorming session, which, in my experience of corporate life, is often a case of one manager looking desperately to subordinates for help. No, this is the creativity of partners invested equally in an outcome working together to play at getting the best possible result.

I’ve written before about how ideas take new forms and develop when written down. This is magnified when those ideas are shared and discussed. I love the process of receiving some text from a client, trying to improve the flow or the structure or even the words themselves, and then sending it back with questions. Then the next version comes across and what I had thought were improvements have then been improved upon further. And so the process continues.

Ai Weiwei probably doesn’t mean collaborative writing in his answer, although there is no reason to assume he dismisses such a thing in his work. But working in an organisation often gives you the chance of collaboration by another name. Think of the memos and manuals and emails and specifications that cross your desk. Instead of taking these as the final word on something, what would happen if you plucked out an idea or two from each document and found new – and better – ways to express them? (Please note that I’m not suggesting you tweak the CEO’s latest announcement and return it, unless there has been an explicit request for ideas for improvement.)

But one thing collaborative writing does do well is help you get away from worrying too much about how something is written. It’s a quick way to get the internal editor off your back and lets you focus instead on the ideas behind your writing. Knowing that someone else is going to play about with the ideas and that you will then have a chance to refine the writing further means that you concentrate on the simple message and the thing you want to say without getting hung up on trying to make it sound clever.

Try it.

Emails: Make Your Point And Get Out Of There

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Many of the emails I receive demand a lot of effort from me before I work out what I am being told or being asked to do. I’m reasonably confident that this is not because I’m stupid.

If the recipient of your email has to engage in struggle before starting on any actual task, chances are that the task is going to suffer. Put the effort in up front. At your end.

Get to the point quickly and make sure the point is the one you wanted to make.

I won’t go on. Instead, here’s a perfect Dilbert cartoon that highlights the issue.

Working In The Illiterate Organization

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Last September I wrote a review of Euan Semple’s wonderful “Organizations Don’t Tweet”. Six months on, I’m still referring to the book and finding insights that continue to delight and inspire.

Euan and I both worked for organizations that might be considered a by-word for literacy. The BBC and Reuters (now Thomson Reuters) are, after all, in the communications business. And yet, for all the front end communication goodness – in the shape of news bulletins or reports from the battlefield or even the latest stock prices from the trading room floor – in my experience at least, the back end (how apt) of the business encouraged illiteracy across great swathes of the organization.

Illiterate Business Writing
One more report like that, and Max would smoke the gas lamp

I don’t mean we were discouraged from reading. There was, indeed, probably way too much information available for reading on a daily basis. On the whole, though, much of this excess information was of little relevance. And, if it was relevant, it tended to be written in a style and format that stood between the reader and the key information.

(A disclaimer, of sorts: I last worked at Reuters some years ago. It is a company I held in high regard, despite the issues of its internal writing standards. In its latest incarnation it may very well be a paragon of the literate organization.)

But reading is only one half of literacy. Writing was always seen as best left for the experts. This appears to be the norm for organizations – especially large organizations. As Euan says in the book at the foot of page 40,

We have professionalized communication and taken it away from the ordinary manager or member of staff.

If anything had to be written for work, there were templates and document titles to use. God forbid that you might create something new. Or useful. And watch the language. In addition, the templates tended to be specific to individual departments, so any chance of breaking down internal silos and sharing knowledge more widely was slim.

In the chapters ‘Literacy Re-discovered’ and ‘Mass Illiteracy’, Euan describes the potential inherent in social media to change that norm. However, when he asserts that writing on the web has the potential to persist and that what “you said last week and last year will still be visible online and you will have to take this into account”, I feel he describes a problem rather than a solution.

This fear of committing to a digital permanence is every bit as scary as the traditional fear of the page. Couple this with the passionless and downright deadly dull business writing that most staff are forced to read on a daily basis and it is no surprise that most employees run screaming from the thought of writing more of the same. When your model is so poor, it is hard to see how to overcome it or head off in new directions.

I agree with Euan that the new social tools can make writing more immediately effective and will go some way to making redundant the old metaphor of the document but I think there is a stage prior to this that businesses need to make happen. It is perhaps a bit of a chicken and egg situation: employees are wary of writing because of the perceptions surrounding writing in the business but can only discover the true benefits of writing by doing it.

Any business that wishes to embrace fully the benefits of better communication – better business, in other words – can either wait for a new generation comfortable with widespread use of the social tools to come into the workplace or it needs to dismantle the obstacles that it places in the way of its employees writing.

Which option will your company choose?

Good Business Writers Take Care Of Their Colons

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There is one element of punctuation that throws even the most experienced writer into wobbles of indecision: the colon. So much so, in fact, that its usage has declined significantly. It’s place has been taken by ‘the dash’ in writing of all sorts. As for its second cousin the semi-colon, it barely registers other than as a sort of upmarket comma.

Punctuation: a colon

Punctuation is the oil that makes the engine of grammar run smoothly. Use the wrong oil – or no oil at all – and your engine grinds to a halt in a spluttering mess of broken parts and misconceptions. In other words, your words may, at worst, appear to be gibberish and, at best, may be misunderstood.

Some punctuation can be left to individual tastes, such as the Oxford comma. (I may discuss this little beauty in another post because it is used less and less often these days and I am a passionate believer that it could quite easily save us from destruction and the onset of a new Dark Age.)

We’re not blessed with a huge range of punctuation marks but each has a specific function and a major part of that function is to enhance the meaning of what we are trying to say. When I abuse or misuse a punctuation mark, I am simply undermining the power of my own words.

So what part does the colon play in supporting the power of words? The strength of the colon is as a signal. When you see a colon, you know that what follows explains or builds on what has just been said. Look at the following sentences.

I’ve never been happier. I love you.
I’ve never been happier: I love you.

In the first example, it is hard to know exactly how the statements are connected. We may guess but can never be sure. Do I love you because I’m happy? Do I love you because you’re sitting beside me and I’ve just watched Scotland finally win an important football match after many years? The second example, however, leaves us in no doubt. I am happy because I love you.

When we reach a colon at the end of a statement, it should come as a relief: it is a promise that the writer will provide us with some information – free of charge – that reinforces what we have just read. This liberates us from the struggle inherent in ambiguity.

The colon can also be used to introduce a list, of course, but that seems to me to be merely an extension of its first and primary use. After all, the components of a list are simply elaborations of the subject of the list.

And what of the semi-colon?

Where the colon acts as a sort of question and answer session all on its own, the semi-colon provides two sides of the same story. The semi-colon gives us a rounded view of a situation or thought. Here is a perfect example from James Joyce in the short story ‘Eveline’ from Dubliners: (see that colon?)

The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses.

Yes, the two statements could have been separated by a full stop. But the use of the semi-colon invites us to engage with the image as a single entity. The footsteps and the man passing are inextricably linked in the mind of the woman listening. The semi-colon invites us into the moment.

Like the colon, the semi-colon also plays a role in lists. You can use it to separate items in a long list (especially when some list items already include commas) or where the list is compressed into a single sentence. Here’s an example:

James Joyce is famous for four books: Dubliners, a set of short stories set in late 19th century Dublin; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel about the childhood and youth of an Irish writer; Ulysses, a novel about one day in the life of a Dublin man; and Finnegans Wake, a long novel about the history of mankind written in a unique form of English.

There’s another little secret about using colons and semi-colons: they make your writing look smarter. If you stick with commas and full stops, nobody will mind too much. Your prose may feel a little leaden and the rhythm may get a little stodgy but nobody’s going to mock. Slip in a colon or two – judiciously, of course – and an occasional semi-colon and your audience will immediately think of you as someone who knows how to write. And that may be the difference between being taken seriously and being ignored.

To end, here is the wonderful Victor Borge discussing his idea for spoken punctuation. Well, it was Victor Borge discussing phonetic punctuation but something called Questar Entertainment has deemed a video of Victor Borge educating us on phonetic punctuation to infringe copyright. I hope Questar Entertainment get a lot of pleasure out of keeping it to themselves. I have removed the link to the video. Please feel free to search high and low for Victor Borge and uncover many wonderfully funny moments.