Entries from April 2008 ↓

Hey, today is the birthday of one William Shakespeare, which gives me a chance to test out my new subscription to Britannica.

The link above gives you access to all their information on Shakespeare, even if you don’t have a subscription yourself.

You can never have too much Shakespeare. Trust me, it’s good for the soul and your writing.

There are three crucial things you must know before you start to write:

What are writing about?

Why are you writing?

Only when you know these can you really organise your thoughts and your writing effectively.

If you’re briefing a copywriter, one of the most important things they need to know is:

Who is your audience?

Are we talking to existing customers? Or prospects? Or both?

Or is this for an internal audience - such as staff or shareholders?

If it’s going to new prospects, will they be familiar with the company? What about the product or service? Will they be familiar with the basic offer?

A copywriter needs to be able to visualise the person they are speaking to. They need to know who they are - not just through some dumb marketing stereo-typing along the lines of ‘C2s’ or ‘empty-nesters.’

A copywriter needs to know who they really are - what they are like, how they talk, what they care about. Ideally, the copywriter needs to be able to draw on personal experiences and friendships - so that they can picture someone they genuinely do know who might fit the audience profile.

That way, the copywriter really can find the right tone of voice.

This is not a precise science. Your audience is likely to be wide and varied. Even if the audience is very precise, these people are still individuals and there is no magic bullet when it comes to the right tone of voice.

But an experienced copywriter will have an idea of how to write, the kinds of language and levels of familiarity and slang to use, depending on the nature of the audience.

Often clients forget to tell copywriters the most basic essentials in a brief. If so, it’s up to the copywriter to make they know the audience as clearly as possible before getting too far into the project.

This really can be as basic as finding out if the communication is aimed at customers or an internal audience such as staff or shareholders. If it’s aimed at customers, are they prospects or have they bought before?

In my experience, a lot of marketing departments and agencies are too quick to fall back on stereo-typing of customers and prospects, lumping them into generalisations. A copywriter needs to see beyond these. Because the generalisations are nearly always insulting, arrogant and immature.

A copywriter can’t afford to be these things. He has to talk to people in a language with which they are comfortable. This means not talking down to them but treating them with respect.

It’s not generalisations about their habits and lifestyles that you need. It’s solid information about what they already know; whether they are likely to be familiar with the company or product; whether or not they already source a similar product from a rival. Or will they have heard bad reports about the product from another source? Or good reports?

If you’re briefing a copywriter and you neglect to tell them these things, then you won’t get the copy you really want (although you possibly will get the copy you deserve).

And if you are a copywriter or aspiring copywriter, then you had better make sure you know these things before you start writing.

A lot of what makes a copywriter effective is the ability to visualise the person you are writing for, to such an extent that it becomes second nature.

Sometimes seeing copy produced by less experienced writers (for example clients) is a sharp reminder that other people either don’t know how to do this or can’t. That’s possibly one reason why they’re not professional writers.

I’ve been working on (read: not getting around to) a post on ‘how to brief a copywriter.’ But that got me thinking about all the things that all too often go wrong in the briefing process. I thought I’d let off steam and dump it all here onto the blog. That’s what a blog is for, isn’t it? So, these are some of the ways NOT to brief a copywriter.

If you commission copywriting, this might give you some insight into how to make life easier for your writer.

If you’re a copywriter, you might recognise some of these. Please feel free to add more in the comments.

1. Email a bunch of PowerPoint slides in the firm conviction that they contain useful information.

2. Telephone out of the blue and, without introducing yourself, start gabbling about your bounce rate.

3. Call up and ask: “How much would it cost to write a website?” Give no indication what kind of website you want, or how large it will be.

4. Deflect that tricky question: “Why should customers buy this product?” Reply along the lines of: “Because I need to meet my sales targets.” We know sales folk are self-obsessed, but come on…

5. Send an email with the mobile phone numbers of various sales executives that the copywriter is to contact for information. Make sure these are people who never answer their phone because they are in ‘meetings’ and who are far too busy and important to reply to voicemail messages.

6. Send the copywriter contact details for a ’satisfied’ client who is to be the subject of a case study. Don’t bother to contact the client yourself to find out if everything is OK. And don’t waste the account manager’s time with such a tiresome and unprofitable after-sales task either. Leave it to the copywriter to discover that the software didn’t work, made life worse for them, and is no longer used. Let the poor writer take the flak for your appalling product and service. Then, when they can’t write a case study because all the feedback is so negative, you won’t have to pay them for the time they wasted.

7. Don’t bother putting a brief together. Let the copywriter figure it out themselves from all the ‘background information,’ you send. Email over lots of design work that is totally irrelevant, along with every conceivable document and case study you can find even if it’s barely related to the project in hand. Dump everything you can find on the copywriter to totally confuse them and waste as much of their time as possible.

8. When asked a relevant question by your copywriter, but you don’t know the answer, string a bunch of clichés together and finish with the phrase: “You’re the wordsmith, I’m sure you can do something with that.”

9. Contact your copywriter and ask them to confirm their availability for an exciting and ever-so important new project. Don’t tell them what the project is. Don’t tell them when it will start. Or what it entails. Or the deadline. Or what copy is needed. Or if any physical meetings are required. Or how much money you’re offering to pay. Just ask them to confirm their availability anyway.

10. Call your copywriter and tell them, in your most stressed out voice, that you have a crisis on your hands. You need copy right away. Can they drop everything and get it to you? There’s not much budget - but tell them it could be the start of something big. You’re sure there will be lots of work to put their way later if they get this one right. They’re sure to believe you, as they’ve never heard this one before. See if they’ll do the job for free, right now, for a very demanding client who expects perfection and more. Then moan about copywriters in general when they don’t return your calls….

All right, that’s out of my system. I’ll get back to working on the much more positive post: ‘How to brief your copywriter.’ Watch this space.