Event Invitation Copywriting

Event invite copywriting – a “before” and “after” comparison.

First I analyse each paragraph – what’s it about?

The draft I was sent was structured like this

  • – The Promise
  • – Sow Doubt
  • – Question (which will be answered)
  • – List of Sales Points
  • – Speakers & event details

When I finished rewriting it, the order had changed to

  • – Open Question
  • – Sow Doubt
  • – Empathise
  • – The Promised Future State
  • – Sales Points [rewritten]
  • – Empathise again
  • – Feeling vulnerable
  • – The Promise
  • – Speaker and Event details

Why will this work better?

The emotional journey is defined and reassurance is included when the Promise comes later in the messaging.

Also the empathetic sentences help the reader to judge quickly if the event is ‘right’ for their needs or not. You don’t want tyre-kickers coming along, do you?

If you’d like to see the full text of before and after #copywriting #B2Bmarketing. Message me.

I would like to do more writing like this for #Brands who need #directresponse marketing done well.

Paris 2024 blocked tweet

When the Olympics can’t use good English

I love the Olympics – it’s been my “thing” since Sydney and I have travelled to watch most of the Games since that time.

And I follow a lot of sport on social media as well – so when I saw Paris 2024 had a Twitter account, I started to follow them too. It’s two years out from the Games now and I love the gradual build up of excitement, plus the news about how the preparations are going.

But Paris 2024 has got really irritating.

Tweeting to your audience

I do know that you should speak to your audience where they are hanging out. And so Twitter is a good choice for Olympic fans like me.

For an international sporting event, held in France, I’m going to guess that English will probably be the second most used language for fans – possibly the first if a lot of folks travel from outside France to watch. And so why, oh why does @Paris2024 not have a native English speaker on their team to do the translations?

In following their tweets they were mostly in French – I speak passable schoolgirl French and so could understand much of what was being said. But then English language tweets started coming out on the account. When one announced a “club” where I could register for advanced ticket information, I was quick to act.

The experience fell flat.

Customer transparency

Naturally I clicked through to register for the Club – but the landing page was beautifully designed (love the font) but lacking in two aspects of English communication

  • The “anticipatory” introduction text above the registration form was poorly written
  • The privacy opt in notices were unclear

Being a bit keen, I rewrote the introduction text and tweeted it back to @Paris2024 to illustrate how it could be improved. They blocked me. FFS that’s just childish and frankly, from a super fan like me, going to really put my back up.

I’ve reproduced the tweets lower down just so you can see whether I did a good job of improving the copy.

Secondly the privacy notices which are probably ore important from a marketing communications point of view were unclear.

I signed up for the “club” and so hope to get information about buying tickets. But what do all these acronyms mean? What if I do not tick either box? Will I get any emails about how to buy tickets? What marketing messages am I missing if I don’t check the box? And who are these partner organisations?

If I’d been copywriting this page I would have written out the names of the organisations in full IOC – International Olympic Committee –  and used similar language in both check box messages so it’s clearer to the user what they get or do not get when selecting each one.  I am guessing the second statement is for the Paralympics. Can you see the inconsistency in messaging?

Paris Olympics, fan communications,

Ambiguous email opt in statement from Olympics Paris 2024

Sport Fan Engagement Strategies

Sports fans are a committed bunch – it takes a lot to put us off your brand. And engagement with fans makes community building in public spaces a great way to sell tickets.

Paris 2024 missed a trick here.

If I was in charge of social media for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games I would do 3 things

  1. Build a fans list on each social media platform and seek to get email engagement with them too.
  2. Segment the list by country, sports of interest and start newsletter messaging for them
  3. Create separate profiles for different languages – Spanish, English, German, French for starters…. It can be confusing to get multi-language updates on one profile.

And they should also get some hashtags going… and when tweeting about Rowing in Great Britain, tag the team (@BritishRowing), write in English as well as French, and choose a photo to illustrate the tweet which actually has a British athlete in it.

Paris 2024, Olympics,

The first tweet announcing the club for receiving email updates 

Paris 2024 Olympics, Poor copywriting,

Others agreed that the English could be improved 

Copywriting, Paris 2024

My improved copy for Paris 2024 landing page 

Paris 2024 blocked tweet

And I got blocked for my troubles. 

British Rowing, Paris 2024, Twitter best practice

I love rowing and this thread about the history ended with a photo which didn’t include any British athletes. Nor did they tag @BritishRowing

Upwork logo, marketplace, hire marketing talent

Confident Briefing on Upwork

I teach a lot of my clients how to use freelance platform marketplaces as a way to find good marketing support contractors.

Upwork is a popular platform. But getting the best out of it depends on one very important skill – briefing.

How to brief a marketing job

A well-briefed job produces the desired output on time and on budget. But many marketers will tell you that this is not what they’ve personally experienced – whether with an agency, with freelancers or sub-contractors.  Let’s set about understanding the skill and the process of making a robust brief and project managing a job to a successful outcome.

The brief parameters

Start by writing down what you want the job to achieve, a goal if you like.

  • We need a new design for….
  • Troubleshoot this issue….
  • Copywrite using these keywords….
  • Sell this product….

You get the idea.

Next go to the platform of your choice, I’ll use Upwork for now, and find out what the template briefing pages ask you to provide.

Write on a document each of the questions they ask. Use these to understand how the platform will use your information to brief the applicants. If they ask you to set an hourly rate or budget this means it will exclude experts who don’t fit your parameters.  Which skills are you listing as necessary? If you ask for questions to be answers, what do you want to learn from those questions – are you using them to screen in or screen out applicants?

You need to set guidance for what success looks like for your project.

The key to a successful Upwork hire

Get the expert to step slowly though the early stages of your selection.

What do I mean by that? Instead of diving into the job and assuming that the work track record examples are sufficient proof of expertise, create a carefully thought-through path whereby you gauge their skill, their communications, their responsiveness and align that with your personal project and its needs.

Here’s an example. I have a website UX redesign project – what are the stages or milestones? How can I find out who has deep expertise compared to shallow experience?  The key is to ask good questions.

These are actual questions set for an SEO brief

  • Have you drastically increased traffic for a website?
  • Can you briefly explain how will you help us achieve the expected outcome?

I recommended changing these to

  • How good or bad is our website SEO?
  • How will you research key words?

They are very simple questions – and the key is that you should know the answers already… In this way you can see if the responder is trying to bamboozle you or gives actual detail of their work process. You want the latter.

The answers will allow you to quickly find out

  1. is their English (written) good enough?
  2. do they sound confident they can do our job?

Creative briefing stage 2

After you have shortlisted, then you need to message the applicants. This is when you actually speak individually to your contractors. Beware of agencies applying where the salesperson replies and you don’t know who will be doing your work. Insist on speaking to them direct.

I usually ask these questions

  1. What are the stages and key milestones in this project?
  2. Can you estimate the number of hours you need for each stage?

And again assess their response, use of English and speed to reply.

Then I call the top 3 and have a 5 minute chat to run through their answers (stages and hours estimate).

After this, I make my hire decision…..

Can I help you learn how to brief?

Get in touch. Briefing is a skill and a process. You can learn how to do it well.  There are some nuances which are specific to types of job and not appropriate for a public post like this. Happy to help.

 

Resources

Marketplaces

 

 

 

Rebecca Caroe copywriting, fountain pen copywrite

My copywriting process explained

I write copy for a living.

I write a lot.  Words, words, words. Each project is designed to fit into a particular desired outcome within a marketing strategy and tactical framework. I say that so you understand context.

Context in writing is both important and valuable – but more about that later.

Rebecca Caroe copywriting, fountain pen copywrite

My actual pen and notes for B2B copywriting

How I write marketing copy

Getting a message across using printed words (as opposed to audio, images or video) is a giant challenge. Knowing how long humans have been writing, you’d think that everything that could have been written has been. And yet…. we know that’s not true.  The imagination and skill of mankind to innovate is immense.

My writing is usually business to business copywriting for marketing purposes. That’s my area of expertise. And so the steps I take begin with the outcome. What do I want to happen as a result of a prospect or client reading what I’ve written?

  • End goal is to click through to website
  • End goal is to understand how to write B2B copy
  • End goal is to reply with a  question

These examples are all valid outcomes and each requires very different copy treatments.

The first version is always factual

What are the true, inalienable facts that support the end goal? I list these in a brain dump document. Frequently these are the result of conversations with the client, the internal team and existing customers.

Then I supplement this with some desk research. Reading ‘around the subject’ can come from many sources – newsletters, online magazines, blogs, books. Interestingly, I rarely search social media for this information. My choice – it may suit your needs. The amazing Knowledge Hunter, Geoff McDowell, taught me so much about this subject.

Adding more copy material

From the wider reading I copy/paste and add in more themes, concepts, nuance, examples, phrases and keywords. I also look out for no-nos. These are things I want to avoid.

Sometimes images, colours, layouts and other visual elements present themselves from this research too. That can be very helpful as my brain often leaps forward towards the end result WAY earlier than it’s supposed to. To avoid distraction, I save and note these ideas back in the research document. By noting them, I have preserved the idea; but I’m not focusing on them at this stage. It means I don’t lose the inspiration – I can revive that thought later just by re-reading my notes.

This all contributes to a second draft. This is when I decide the overall frame for the project and HOW does this translate into the copywriting. This could be storytelling, it could be demonstration, case study, questioning, educating. There is a lot more information added, there are more concepts and overall I just write freely incorporating the research information and framing arguments, emotions and logic into one long piece of writing.

This is the place where context comes to the fore. How will the message be delivered, what will the recipient be doing or not doing? Where in the customer journey will they be? What is the outcome or next step goal in this campaign?

Editing and refining copy

This is the part I love.

Precise and concise are watchwords which I hope any client applies to a testimonial about my business copywriting.

Taking what I wrote and simplifying, cutting, removing extraneous information and honing it down into a tight, precise and well-organised message is a repetitive task and it gives me so much pleasure. Sometimes I use a technique of adding in sub-headings (as in this blog) because it helps me to organise and find the big messages in the very long copy.

Often I leave the first opening paragraph until last because it’s so hard. Sometimes I switch the first and last paragraphs – try it!

Headlines and calls to action are a separate challenge and I may do a couple of different versions or give options and let the client choose. This is because they are mostly better-informed about their product or service than I am. Teamwork helps work out what will resonate and achieve the goal.

And then I sleep on it

Yes this is really the final step before showing it to the client, adding it to a mock-up or an EDM. This is important and is one reason why planning at the first step needs to include deadlines and allowances for sleep time.

7 things I’ve appreciated after sleeping on my work

  1. My brain is fresher in the morning
  2. I process ideas while resting
  3. Better re-writes are (nearly always) possible
  4. I can check that I haven’t missed anything out [done this MANY times – but rescued the situation before the client read it]
  5. Reflect on alternative approaches which I earlier discarded
  6. Opportunity to print it onto paper and read out loud
  7. Check grammar, punctuation, capitalisations and links all working and correctly placed

And that’s it. The whole creative writing process for B2B copy.

About the picture illustrating this article.

That’s really my pen and my notebook, photographed this morning as I got a tiny bit of inspiration for a client as a result of doing some research for a different client. It’s odd the way my brain works. And I have learned to respect my brain process and to always seize the moment and make the notes when they jump into my mind. I don’t have to use them – but I’m sure I will lose them if they aren’t captured.

I do not have the neatest handwriting, yet using blue-black ink in an old-fashioned fountain pen gives me both pleasure and the chance to read my words again without guessing what I meant to write. Someday I’ll photograph some of my notes which turn out to be illegible even to me. Generally when I rush to write, legibility suffers.

The unknown part of writing inspiration

The pen also lives in a leather case. My ritual of opening the case flap and flicking back the long cover, unsheathing the pen and unscrewing its lid before writing still gives me a frisson. I never know exactly what will come out of the inky nib onto that pristine sheet of paper, onto the next empty line, or inserted between the paragraphs of print.

And the pen – a birthday gift chosen with care while on holiday. I got the nib re-surfaced by this amazing pen expert who recommended not using ink cartridges. He also explained a lot about the issues of ink/paper and my unique hand/pressure and what a converter is, not a bladder. There is a distinction between them.

So now you know my B2B writing process. What will you do with this knowledge?

 

Brief Rebecca on your copywriting project

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writer, person writing, cop

Key parts in a professional email

I got a question about what the four elements that comprise a “professional email”.  I don’t know why the questioner thought that there were four parts.  My best practice has three parts:

  1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them
  2. Tell them
  3. Remind them what you already said

Easy!writer, person writing, cop

Good email message structure

Slightly less flippantly, the structure of a good message is based around short sentences, simple sentence structure, short words and a clear indication about what you want the reader to do next.

If you can achieve all those things, that’s a great start.

More sophisticated messaging can come through with brand tone of voice, longer messaging plans over months / weeks and a mix of brand, educational and product/service messages. [Ask me how to plan your email marketing.]

Drafting and editing email messages

My personal method when creating EDMs is to work through these steps

  • What is the key message?
  • What is one thing I want the reader to do?
  • Then I start writing…. beginning with the LAST paragraph
  • Add in any context that explains the message (in case they are new to my list)
  • Remind them of benefits
  • Ask for the money / action
  • Add a PS.

Then I sleep on it overnight.  Always.

Because most of my messages can be improved and that only happens after time passes.  I think my brain matures the message and having a bit of time after having written it means I can move into editing mode.  That is a very different brain space and a different skillset.

Now I’m not a visual specialist so I get someone who is good at images to contribute here when I can.

Practice, practice

And then you just need to do it many times to improve your skill.

For examples of best practice copywriting for B2B marketing read on.

click stream, analysis, email click

Click Analysis to raise ROI

Take a look at your most recent email marketing campaign and review where people clicks and how many people clicked on each link.

I found that we were getting a lot of clicks in an unexpected place and we were able to correct that in our next campaign iteration. I also recommend a chrome extension which will help you appraise your website clicks.

Watch more Recession Marketing videos

and find the top 6 actions for marketing strategy for a recession.

Analysis of CEO message to customers

Writing tone of voice aligned with brand values is a powerful marketing tool.

This email is so powerful because the structure of this message is aligned to brand values

  1. open Reminder of their mission 
  2. Then acknowledge pain
  3. New tools that support their community
  4. Sign off with a humble acknowledgement

The full text

Dear SoundCloud Creators,

Since our founding, SoundCloud’s mission has been to give people the power to share, connect and grow through music.

As the coronavirus crisis has unfolded, we’ve seen a global outpouring of tracks on SoundCloud — with a 50% surge in creators uploading in the past month alone. But behind this creative response, we know there continues to be financial loss and uncertainty for our creator community.

Last week we rolled out our first wave of creator support — our partnership with Twitch, 50% off SoundCloud Pro Unlimited, a resource guide and weekly creator office hours with our artist relations team — to help with the impact some of you are facing. This felt like a good start, but we want to do more for the long term.

Today, we’re accelerating a series of new initiatives and over $15M in direct investment to support creators on SoundCloud during this difficult time.

  • New direct fan-support button for all creators.
    We’ve created a simple button for your SoundCloud profile to connect your preferred way to receive direct fan support including Kickstarter, Patreon, Bandcamp, Paypal and more. Learn how to get this live on your profile right now.
  • $5M in free promotional support for all creators to drive more plays on SoundCloud.
    For the rest of 2020, we’re giving away all of our Promote on SoundCloud inventory. Tag your SoundCloud uploads #GetMorePlays and our editorial team will select up to 5 artists per week to feature with promotion. More details to come soon on our blog.
  • Immediate launch of Repost by SoundCloud, a new marketing and distribution service.
    Independent artists who want to take their career to the next level can now access professional marketing and monetization services plus industry-leading distribution features. Repost by SoundCloud is available to everyone, no play count thresholds. Learn more here.
  • $10M artist accelerator program to support independent creators’ career growth.
    We are committing $10M to help fuel the careers of independent artists upstreamed from Repost by SoundCloud into our artist services offering, Repost Select. Apply here.

We understand our efforts here are no match for the care providers on the frontlines of this global crisis. But we will continue to look for ways to support our global SoundCloud community, so you can keep sharing music we can all turn to in these challenging times, and long into the future.

Kerry