Blogs are everywhere, it seems. They are featured on websites, and on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media. Why are they so popular? Because they are easy to write, easy to post, and most of all easy to read.

The point is that blogs are an essential way that savvy businesses get their educational and marketing messages read. There is little expense to producing a blog (especially if you can write and post it yourself). They are custom made for today’s social media outlets. Chances are that your website’s content management system incorporates a simple blog writing and posting tool. And this is important: Something written as a blog doesn’t have to remain locked up in this cubby hole. It can be subsequently used as part of an E-mail campaign or other marketing initiative.

Blogs can consist of the written word, videos, or even pictures/slide shows. Of course, the use of videos or slide shows requires a bit more knowledge of how to interface with YouTube and Powerpoint, so for the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus on written communications only.

I’ve seen blogs that are only 3 paragraphs long, and I’ve seen some that take up 15 paragraphs (which, by the way, take too long to read). As a business owner or executive, you have something you want to tell your customers (past, present, and future). It may be educational in nature—give viewers some of your expertise on a particular area and tell them why it’s important. Don’t forget to include a “call to action,” for example, by reminding them to check on a critical detail in their auto policy or to ask for help in choosing their health coverage.

Give readers your message concisely and in your best voice. It is that simple. My advice is to write up to four blogs as soon as possible and post them as a group. This represents sort of a “critical mass,” which will also help, if entered into your search engine optimization process, much more content for the Googles and Yahoos of the browser world to register and rank. From there, you may decide to post a new blog once a week or once a month. The key is to do it on a regular basis—don’t leave it for 6 months at a time.

And there’s the common problem—how to find the time to write a blog. There is a simple solution. Have a 10-minute conversation with a writer. Give him or her a couple of bullet points to work from, and let them produce the draft. If you have the time to speak with a writer for 10 minutes each week or month, you can post a new blog on a ridiculously frequent basis. And think of how much content that will generate for your other marketing needs!

Marketing Efforts: No Need to Run, Walking Is Just Fine

By Stanton R. Mehr

President, Revisions Communications & Editorial Services

www.revisions-editorial.com

stan.mehr@revisions-editorial.com

Have you ever jogged in 90-degree weather? It’s sweaty, laborious‑not a joyous experience, and even hazardous. That’s how many small businesses feel about taking time out of their extremely busy day to market themselves. Yes, if they are blinkered enough on their daily activities, they may consider it hazardous to getting actual work done.

It can be just the opposite though‑lethal to your business if you don’t expend the time needed to develop an environment where you create new prospects and enable a sale to take place. This focus on future revenues helps successful businesspeople sleep at night.

The real question is how to best utilize the time for marketing efforts. First and probably easiest, is to spend time thinking about your website. In 2016, almost all businesses, old and new, have a web presence, so we’re not talking about creating a whole new site, more likely some tweaks. But is your website a reflection of how you do business today (or want to)? Does it fulfill the requirements for good search engine optimization, if you’re in a business that requires being found on the Web. Does it complement any social media efforts that your company has developed?

Speaking of social media, did your announcement or press release hit Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and any of the other latest and greatest apps? Did your 15% off promotion reach the intended audience?

There are many effective ways to market your business. One of the most reasonable ways to spend your marketing hours is to become a member of a local business group. For the trades, this is essential. For companies who are interested in selling locally, it makes a great deal of sense. With a couple of hours a week, relationships can be built that assure a steady flow of revenue for the coming months.

Marketing does take work. It is not exactly sweaty, muscle-taxing effort, but it is something that well-managed organizations emphasize to help them succeed. Set aside a few hours each week to exercise those marketing muscles. We’d love the opportunity to help you get started.

See our contact page for more information. 

Stanton Mehr is President of Revisions Communications & Editorial Services, an organization that is focused on providing top-notch writing, editing, and communication services for your business.

Lessons of the Lowly Press Release

By Stanton R. Mehr
President
Revisions Communications and Editorial Services

www.revisions-editorial.com

stan.mehr@revisions-editorial.com

Consider the lowly press release. Time tested certainly, but sexy? Few would say so. But it is still around today, used everywhere—in newspapers, on the Web, on social media, printed for viewing at live events. The reason is simple. It works. It is an official announcement or record of an event or achievement. It is easy to produce. It is extremely cost effective. And it can be used just about anywhere, in any format. It can be sent to local media; disseminated in a custom E-mail blast; included in press kits; and posted on your website, Facebook, and Linked-In Page.

But that is not all. For the smallest investment, you get valuable, additional benefits, that will help your marketing efforts in the future—you are presented with the opportunity to not only announce your newest achievement, hiring, or contract, but you get the chance to refocus your marketing message—what your company is all about. And this can result in a fresh, new description of your company, with many potential, profitable implications.

Let me explain. Unlike most copywriting, there is relatively little art in creating a press release. They are usually written from a well-recognized template. It includes the standard newsworthy headline, subhead, and dateline. Next, comes the “Wow” statement to draw in the reader, the “So-What” explanatory paragraph, a supporting quote or two from key principals of the company or those mentioned in the press release (explaining what this news means for consumers and customers in general), followed by the closing statement and information about who to contact for more information.

Finally, we get to the “boilerplate” statement about your company. This may be cut and pasted from text that you’ve used since the turn of the century or taken directly from your recent website pages, brochures, or other marketing materials. But in about 30 words, can you write a powerful characterization of your company and its place in its business sector? Is it simply “the premier manufacturer of widgets in the Northeast” or is it the company “whose widgets were ranked highest quality in a survey of 5,000 consumers by JD Snortbum and Company?” Do you want to describe the organization as the “oldest manufacturer of widgets in the state” or as “a company with a rich 125-year history of providing quality widgets and unparalleled service in the metropolitan region.” 

Whatever you decide, this simple, brief statement should be reflected in all of your marketing materials and communications. It may prompt you to question what are the 2 or 3 most important differentiators of your company or decide that these differentiators have changed over time.

In any case, writing a press release allows you to review the most compelling description possible of your organization. It gives you the opportunity to promote something new about your business and revisit why it is special. Some things are both inexpensive and priceless.


Stanton Mehr is President of Revisions Communications & Editorial Services, an organization that is focused on providing top-notch writing, editing, and marketing communication services for your business.

The Content of Business-to-Business Email Blasts: Educating not Selling

By Stanton R. Mehr

President, Revisions Communications & Editorial Services

www.revisions-editorial.com

stan.mehr@revisions-editorial.com

So you’ve decided to try your hand at Email marketing to your existing and prospective clients. Let’s assume for the moment that you have gathered or purchased a list of Email addresses and have them ready to go in a database. For some people, that was the easy part! Deciding what to broadcast may be more difficult—and not necessarily because of the writing process but because of the choices in front of you.

For the foundation of the Email campaign, the decisions you next make should be the same whether you are manufacturing widgets, marketing financial services, or selling videogames. In order to attract current and future clients, your Email content has to present something useful or valuable to them. And that doesn’t mean the client needs a blatant marketing lesson on why your company is the greatest and cheapest. Instead, one of the best approaches to successful campaigns is to provide some aspect of education regarding your (or even their) business. This can involve facts about the services or products that you know they need. It may be information on how to optimize the use of a product or how to make the best decisions in purchasing it.

Let’s consider the owner of a small print shop who wants to boost business card revenues from local clients. He or she can include information about the value of business card exchange (e.g., “Did you know the most important elements to be included on a business card?” or “Did you know that clients hold onto business cards from contacts for an average of X months?”). These 3 or 4 lines can then be added to a discount promotion code (with a link to the website) for future business card printing and design services. This concept can be extended easily into an Email campaign, in which every weekly message builds upon the previous one, with more educational information on the same or new topics.

For most readers of Email, the subject line of the message is the clue as to whether it will be worth their while to click on it. This decision is nearly instantaneous, as you can attest: You and I both spend less than half a second deleting Emails that scream “Save 80%!!!!” This may work for some segment of the consumer population, but in business-to-business communications, the target client needs something else: The subject line of the Email should communicate true value to the viewer—and not be perceived as a sales pitch. That value is proven in better knowledge, including not only tips, but why it is important for their business. The educational approach frames in your clients’ mind that your business is knowledgeable, professional, and maybe most important—helpful.

Stanton Mehr is President of Revisions Communications & Editorial Services, an organization that is focused on providing top-notch writing, editing, and communication services for your business.

E-mail Blasts: Do the Pluses Outweigh the Minuses?

By Stanton R. Mehr

President, Revisions Communications & Editorial Services

www.revisions-editorial.com

stan.mehr@revisions-editorial.com

For many small businesses, E-mail blasts are a very inexpensive way to stay in touch with existing customers and to drum up new business. In a future blog, I’ll discuss content for the E-mail blast, but the point of this entry is whether to do them at all. Are they worth the time and effort?

What About the Mailing List?

The decision to do any E-mail blast is predicated on you having access to or maintaining a list of customers or prospects. Perhaps the greatest cost of doing an E-mail blast is the list rental, which is available for nearly all customer types, from third-party suppliers. If you have your own list, built up over several years of networking and completed projects, then the cost of doing the E-mail blast is even lower.

This is not to say that it doesn’t make sense to do the E-mail blast campaign if you don’t own the list, but it will be more expensive to conduct. Even if you need to rent or purchase a list, any sales you generate through the campaign can easily outweigh the cost of the list.

Won’t I Risk Annoying Potential Customers?

An argument against doing E-mail marketing campaigns is that the majority of people will not open your E-mail, consigning it to the deleted folder as quickly as they see it. That is true. Today’s busy business owner is used to quickly scanning the subject lines of incoming E-mail, opening any of interest.

Consider this scenario: If you send out E-mail blasts to 500 contacts (both existing and prospective customers), you may get the bulk of your existing customers to open the E-mail because they recognize your name. You have succeeded in one important goal of the program—continuing communication with your customer! Here’s the second major benefit: If say 450 of these contacts are new prospects, and only 20 (4%) open your E-mail, you’ve just qualified a solid number of contacts for new business. You can communicate directly with these executives, and perhaps two or three may contact you directly to inquire about your services, and depending on the nature of the sale, one may more than enough to pay for an inexpensive E-mail campaign!

I Don’t Have the Time or Knowledge to Set up a Campaign

Another argument against E-mail marketing campaigns is that they are difficult to organize and conduct. Nearly every customer relationship management (CRM) database, like Salesforce for example, make it easy to choose which mailing list you’d like to use and offer templates for E-mail campaigns. They also help you set up the “unsubscribe” buttons to keep the mailing list targeted to only those who want to receive your communications.

For those without CRM programs, free programs like MailChimp, or inexpensive providers like Constant Contact, can help you design simple, yet effective E-mail campaigns.

In essence, there are few downsides to doing E-mail blasts to your customers. The next question is, what will be the content of those blasts? We’ll discuss this critical subject next time.

Stanton Mehr is President of Revisions Communications & Editorial Services, an organization that is focused on providing top-notch writing, editing, and communication services for your business.

The Evolution in Publishing Challenges Writers and Editors Alike

By Stanton R. Mehr, President, Revisions Communications & Editorial Services

www.revisions-editorial.com

stan.mehr@revisions-editorial.com

I’ll be showing my age here, but does anyone remember the old days of lead type and the California Job Case? Well, I do, and I’ve worked through the many evolutions (and revolutions) that have eliminated “repro” copy, press type, and typesetting companies with old Linotype machines. Those were the days—the days when you could take the time to mull over the correct word, afford several layers of copyediting, and properly address the organization of a manuscript, promotional piece, or paper.

We gained a tremendous amount of production efficiency, slashing the time it takes to go from manuscript to press. I recall working five months in advance to ensure that I had adequate time for the entire process: 2 weeks to edit a new paper, 3 weeks to get queries answered by the author and obtain their final approval, and 1 to 2 weeks for the typesetters to send back galleys (through regular mail or UPS, of course!). Once we had a suitable back and forth with the typesetters to ensure that proofreaders found nothing further to correct, the graphic artist used a drafting table to spray the back of the galley and position it exactly, ensuring base alignment and cross alignment, and placed in the artwork. This could take anywhere from 2 days to 5, depending on how many articles were appearing in that month’s issue and what other work the graphic artists were handling. Editors would then review the page proofs, ensure the folios were in the right position, nothing was crooked, and no tape was obscuring type, before approval was given and it was sent to the printer in huge, well-packed, delivery boxes. We received bluelines about 2 weeks later, which the editors hovered over for the entire day.

Today, an article is often edited in 1 to 2 days, sent to the author with a 3–5-day turnaround for approval, laid out on a page-layout program like InDesign or Quark in 1 hour, and proofread the next day. If a PDF is to be posted on a website, the whole process may take less than 2 weeks, and this may include writing the piece!

We’ve lost some important things along the way, from both a communications and technical standpoint. Ability to publish in hours not days or weeks has created a careless imperative to do so. The better writers and communicators step back from their work, if only for a few hours or overnight, reread their copy, and then decide on next steps (which should still be to have someone else to review the content).

Today’s common communication and publishing technologies have revealed a difficulty for most experienced editors—it is not as easy to edit a document in PDF form as it is on paper. In using typical PDF commenting tools, I estimate that it takes me twice as long to ensure that the graphic artist responsible for making typographical corrections can understand what I’m trying to correct. And who hasn’t been confused when viewing a Word document through “Track Changes” that has multiple revisions?

Few people recognize the standard proofing and editing marks we editors used to make routinely in the margins of galleys and in the printed manuscript. That’s progress in publishing, I guess.

Stanton Mehr is President of Revisions Communications & Editorial Services, an organization that is focused on providing top-notch writing, editing, and communication services for your business.