Essay Online

You know the secret to a long-term, and profitable, client relationship is delivering effective communication tools. But you may not realize that the impact of your writing has more to do with your skill as a writer than with your knowledge of the subject.

And unless you help your clients understand the value of your skills, you limit your opportunities to sell those skills again and again.

Every business has its own specialists, people who know more about their products and services than you’ll ever know. So why can’t they produce great marketing copy, clear user guides, or truly effective training for their employees and sales reps?

Because they don’t have the skills that you do, the talent for communicating with impact to achieve specific results. We’ve all met experts who “know their stuff” but can’t share their knowledge — perhaps your math or physics or French teacher, or an engineer or programmer in a company you know, or even your doctor, lawyer, or insurance agent.

At some point, a company realizes they need help communicating, educating prospects, customers, and their own employees about the benefits and best practices associated with their products and services. They go looking for outside help . . . and then they forget why!

Your long-term success depends on reminding them of that need for communication skills. Most of these experts, whether clinicians or programmers or engineers or legal experts, are more comfortable talking to people just like themselves, rather than creative types like artists and writers.

Left to themselves, they’ll hire someone who knows a lot about their area, but perhaps writes only a little better than they do. And a year or two later, they’ll be looking for someone else to help them when they realize that all the copy and training content and documentation they have churned out has produced mediocre results.

Help yourself and help your clients.

When you get an opportunity to talk to a prospect about creating effective communications for them, keep pushing the conversation toward the skills they need to pull it off. Make sure they understand their own need for someone different from the resources they already have in house. Help them recognize that your skills complement their knowledge, that it is that combination that produces results in the form of higher revenues, more customers, or enhanced employee performance.

Even if you know their subject matter well, your skills are more important. After all, should their product line change, or new markets open, they may be dealing with a new body of knowledge in a year or two.

But their need for effective communication will remain, and, if you’ve positioned yourself as the “communication expert” of their team, you’ll continue to have opportunities for business from existing clients even as their business practices and markets change.

Writing sales copy for a new or to-be-relaunched product takes a lot of energy and concentration. When you finish that first draft, take a rest. Then go back to what you’ve written with this sales copy checklist, which outlines the eight most frequent corrections and improvements I make on copy given to me by clients or students.

1. Pronouns. Do you have a preponderance of “we” or “I” and very little “you”? Wherever possible, change pronouns to “you,” which comes across as more captivating and relevant to the reader than “I” or “we.” In many cases, this seemingly mechanical rewording task forces you to ask yourself, “Why should the reader care about this?” or “What does this mean for customers?” That’s great, because shoppers and information seekers are looking for what’s meaningful to them, not for a monologue about the company.

2. Verb tense. Hunt for places where you used future-tense verbs (”will ____”) and change them wherever you can to present tense. This conveys more confidence and has a stronger impact. For example, change “Before leaving, we will check all pipe connections to make sure they are tight” to “Before leaving, we check all pipe connections and make sure they are tight” or even better, “Before leaving, we make sure all pipe connections are tight.”

3. Extra verbiage. Now find all the spots where your writing takes the long way around, and make your choice of words crisper and more direct. Get rid of the extra helper verb in “Together, we work to create reachable goals,” for instance, changing it to “Together, we create reachable goals.” Instead of “In almost every case, executives who have the intention of fostering teamwork do not know the best methods of getting optimal results,” write “Usually, executives who want to foster teamwork don’t know the most powerful techniques,” or even better, “Few executives know the most powerful teamwork techniques.”

4. Unnecessary sentiments. Wherever you said things like “It goes without saying that…” or “When we say X, it’s not just words,” either express the idea in a stronger, more interesting way or leave it out. Remember: If it truly goes without saying, then don’t say it!

5. Sentence variety. Look at the length and types of sentences in your copy. Do they mostly have a simple, short “subject, verb, object” pattern? If so, combine some sentences and sprinkle in longer sentences starting with a subordinating word like “when,” “because” or “through.” Are most of your sentences long and complicated? If so, make some of them short and stark: “This works.” “Not any longer.” “Benefits sell.” By helping the copy to flow, sentence variety keeps the reader reading.

6. Bulleted lists. Bullets organize points for fast, easy skimming. You can make bullets even easier to read quickly by adding short, boldface headers to the beginning of the bullets. The same goes for numbered lists &ndash as in this article, where each point starts with a summary of the topic in one to three words.

7. Company focus. Never assume that you can say something once and have the reader keep it constantly in mind! Suppose the copy you’ve written describes a service for chefs. Although many companies provide this service, only this company specializes in providing this service for chefs. Instead of making this point just once, drive it home repeatedly by adding the word “chefs” again and again throughout the copy: “For chefs…”; “When chefs…”; “Chefs find that…”; and so on. This drumbeat of specialization also helps attract search engine traffic.

8. Call to action. Most copywriters know that you need to ask for a response to get a response, by ending any piece of copy with a call to action, such as “Call today to start a free, no-obligation discussion of your needs” or “Order your Wonder Widget now.” But on a multi-page web site, I usually see a call to action missing on most of the pages. Probably people are thinking that visitors take a certain sequenced path through the site, getting eventually to the page where they’ve placed the call to action. That’s not how people engage with web sites, though. To prompt action, end every page on a web site with a call to action.

Although many other factors also contribute to the power and success of copy, the neglected ones above have a surprisingly strong impact on readers when consistently applied. They create lean, lively, relevant writing. Practice these techniques and enjoy a more vigorous response!