Freelance Copywriting, marketing and social media tips

This article was supplied by Printed.com, suppliers of unbeatable quality digital leaflet printing, and a shortlisted company for this year’s industry leading Print Week Environmental Company of the Year 2011 award.

The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.

Leaflets are a great way to drum up some business, assuming the content is up to scratch. However, writing effective copy for your leaflets is quite a skill.

Leaflets are an excellent way of targeting a particular area or demographic with details of your business, and flyer printing is a cheap and simple process thanks to advances in digital printing. However, simply putting together a leaflet and sending it out isn’t enough. Your content has to sparkle in order to grab the attention of your readers and raise it above the level of the dozens of other leaflets they will encounter on a regular basis.

Before you start…

To begin with, there are two general principles you should remember. One is that attention to detail is really important. When you have finished writing your leaflet copy, check it, re-check it and check it again. Then get someone else to read your leaflet. Printing thousands of substandard flyers isn’t going to do you any favours, as spelling and grammatical mistakes make you look lazy – and if you can’t be bothered to proofread a flyer, why should the customer have any confidence that you will pay them the attention they need? The other principle is not to over-stuff your leaflet with too much information or extraneous text. Readers don’t want to plough through any more than they have to.

1. Grab the attention

Flyer printing is an excellent way to access new customers, but you need to engage them straight away. Don’t leave your best material for the end of the leaflet. You need to grab their attention in the opening words – since these are all that many people will read. Most customers will take just a few seconds to assess your leaflet, before deciding to keep it or throw it away. In addition, if your leaflet is displayed alongside others in a rack, the first third or so is all that casual onlookers will see. You need something to make them pick it up. Have a look at other leaflets to see which achieve this and which fail. Images are sometimes good, and digital printing means you can include colour pictures at a relatively low cost. Nevertheless, make sure they add to rather than distract from your leaflet’s message.

2. Draw them in

Having gained your potential customer’s attention, you need to prompt them to consider your business or service further. A good way to do this is to ask a question that has particular relevance for them, and then offer the solution. Readers don’t want or need to know all about your business; what they want to know is what it can do for them. All the detail in the world won’t help you to make a sale or gain a client if they can’t see how it relates to their needs. So, put yourself in a potential customer’s position and write your leaflet copy accordingly.

3. End with a prompt

Finally, make sure you end your leaflet with a ‘call to action’ – a little encouragement to your audience to take the next step and get in touch, visit or find out more. Needless to say, make sure that they have all the information they need to do this, whether it’s directions and a map, a website or phone number. (Make sure that you are going to be able to deal with people who get in touch that way – there’s no point including a phone number on your flyer if you don’t have staff around to answer the calls.)

The call to action restates the reason they might want to find out more, and tells them how they can do it: ‘To cut your heating bills by 30 percent, phone us on…’ Don’t just give them the information they need in the flyer and expect them to make the leap to contacting you. Including this one extra sentence can result in a far more effective leaflet campaign.

Browsing through this blog, you will come across numerouse posts about search engine optimisation covering a range of issues to help you get the most out of your online presence.

But there is one area that many people don’t even consider – your images.

Every reader likes to see a visual image. They help reinforce, and at times, strengthen the text you read. They can add excitement and impact to your copy, plus they have the added advantage of offering another way for people to search for your conten through image specific search.

To help you understand this concept further, take a look at this very informative post on TopRankblog.com by Ashley Zeckerman. According to Ashley…

Images are essential for both search and social media marketing with growing popularity as a social media asset. Long time image hosting and social network Flickr hosts well over 50 billion images and social media image sharing services like Instagram and Pintrest have exploded in popularity:

• Pinterest has grown 4,000% in the past 6 months
• Instagram added over 2 million users in November

To discover more about how you can optimise your images, go to Ashely’s post 3 Ways to Optimise Images: Search, Social Media & User Experience.

Sally Ormond, Copywriter

A while ago, I wrote a post about how to keep your copywriting clients happy. As we all know, if you want to set yourself apart from the rest of the crowd, excelling in customer service is the way to go.

Usually, the press is full of bad news stories. If someone has received truly awful service they spend hours telling everyone about it. But what about the occasions where good service is received?

Surely, there must be some companies out there who are getting it right?

Well, I’m about to redress the balance with a couple of examples I recently experienced.

Printers, printers everywhere, but which one do I choose?

Just before Christmas, my printer decided to fall out with my computer and refuse to print anything. After much searching through troubleshooting guides and help forums, I decided the only thing to do was to ditch it for a newer model.

But which one to choose? If you’ve shopped for printers recently you’ll know how many are out there. After asking round colleagues for advice, I decided a trip to my local Staples was on order to see what I could find.

First, I was greeted by a member of staff asking whether I needed any help.

I explained what I was looking for and he immediately asked loads of questions about how I would be using the printer, whether I wanted a multifunction model etc.

Once I gave him all the information he needed, he instantly whittled it down to 3 models. Then we chatted about ink and paper costs, so he even worked out which one would be the cheapest to run.

I bought the printer I needed and left a very happy shopper.

Beeeeeeeeep

Don’t you just hate it when, after you’ve gone through a seemingly endless automated phone system and finally get to speak to a real person, you get cut off.

Well that happened to me the other day. I phoned Santander to find out some details about international payments. Before I got cut off, the guy I was speaking with was very helpful. At this point I would like to stress that the phone went dead due to the adverse weather conditions and the fact that I was phoning on my VoIP line – so when the wind blew out my broadband, my phone also died.

To my amazement, after about 15 minutes, my phone rang (by this time my broadband was once again functioning) and it was the guy I’d been speaking with.

He was most apologetic that he hadn’t phoned back sooner but got caught on another call.

Amazing – such a simple thing to do and yet so few companies do it.

Neither of these examples are exactly ground breaking stuff, but it just goes to show that simply by treating your customers as real people and having a desire to make sure they receive the product or advice they need, you’ll provide them with a positive experience.

Would I use either company again?

Absolutely.

Over to you

Have you received a particularly good service recently?

Perhaps you’ve received terrible service?

Whatever the case, leave a comment below and share them with us.

Sally Ormond, Copywriter

The humble white paper is a great way to help people make decisions.

If you’re unsure what a white paper is, basically, it’s a document that describes a problem and shows the reader how to resolve it:

•    It begins by discussing a challenge experienced by its readers
•    Gives a compelling case as to why you should use a particular approach to solve the problem

I guess you could say they are a cross between a brochure highlighting the consumer benefits of a particular product or service and an educational magazine article, therefore conveying technical information within a marketing format.

But happens once they’re published?

The information within them is valuable marketing collateral so it seems a waste to allow it to gather dust.

Make the most of your white papers

White papers can be anything from 6 to 50 pages in length; that’s a lot of information.

Whether you publish them online or produce them as print materials, there is a way to get a bit more mileage out of them.
One such way is to repurpose the content for your corporate blog. After all, how many times have you found yourself scrabbling round for blog posts?

There are only so many times you can pester your subject matter experts within your company to write something for you. Plus, (no disrespect to the technical bods) their writing tends to be too complex for your blog readership who are looking for short posts packed with easily digestible information.

Whether you have the time and expertise within your own company to do this, or you hire in an outside copywriter, a single white paper can create a series of interesting posts.

All you have to do is:

•    Re-write the content with your new readership in mind
•    Devise a way of splitting the content down into individual sections (a 15-20 page white paper should generate about 7 blog posts)
•    Find new ways of presenting the information (e.g. info graphics as well as text)

Before you know it, you’ll have generated a whole new series of marketing collateral.

In this way, a single white paper that would normally have been forgotten about can be converted into fresh, vibrant content that will reach out to a whole new market whilst providing you with an endless stream of blog posts.

For many new tweeters, that is probably the first question that springs to mind.

After setting up your account, you probably searched for friends, family and colleagues and then came to a grinding halt.

What happens next? How do you find new followers?

Let Twitter give you a helping hand

If you go to your Twitter page, you should see something like this:

At the top of the screen you can see #Discover, clicking on this brings up this screen. As you can see, it gives you the options ‘who to follow’ and ‘find friends’.

But what happens when people follow you?

Should you automatically follow them back?

The simple answer is no. Take control of your Twitter stream and follow only those people you want to follow.

Here are 5 very simple ways to make sure you get value out of your Twitter experience:

1. Say farewell to spam

When someone follows you, take a look at their tweets. Are they excessively promotional? If so, they are more than likely going to be a spammer. Unless you want your stream full of their plugs, don’t bother following them back.

2. What are they saying?

Someone’s Twitter feed will tell you a lot about them. Take a look at their past tweets – do you find them interesting? If so, follow them, if not, don’t bother.

3. OTT

Tweeters come in all shapes and sizes; some have a lot to say, others very little. If someone follows you who is a prolific tweeter think carefully before following them back. Do you really want them to be filling your Twitter stream 24/7?
If what they’re saying is interesting, go ahead and follow. But if you’re not so sure, it may be better to pass.

4. Silent night

Twitter is all about being social and that means interacting. If you’ve been trying to engage with a particular follower and they’ve just been ignoring you, you’re not really getting any value out of that relationship so it may be time to unfollow and find someone who’s a little chattier.

5. Bio and interests

The best way to find out a bit about your followers is through their biography. Personally, if there is no avatar (i.e. uploaded their own rather than using a generic one), or there is no bio (or a very poor one) I won’t follow back.

Your bio is where you can add details about you, your likes and dislikes. It’s the best way to work out whether you have something in common with your follower or not. If you do, you are far more likely to enjoy a great Twitter relationship.

At the end of the day, Twitter is about being social. It’s not about a band of silent stalkers that don’t interact with each other.
Choose who you follow carefully to make sure you get the most out of your experience. By following these 5 very simple ‘quality checks’, you’ll be able to ensure your Twitter followers will add value to your social media activities.

Sally Ormond – Copywriter and Tweeter