• 6 tricks guaranteed to improve your copywriting
• Excellent free Marketo report on waking up inactive email subscribers
• How the Darley Dale Brass Band proved the power of local publicity
• On The Marketability Grapevine on Facebook
• Tip of the week: If your grandmother can’t understand it …

6 tricks guaranteed to improve your copywriting

‘How to I write better copy but faster?’ is one of the most frequent challenges about copywriting volunteered by participants on our courses.

Here are 6 personal tips that I guarantee will help:

1. Give writing copy your full attention, shut out distractions. Why should a reader engage with it if you don’t?
2. Visualise a real person on the receiving end and write to them as you would speak.
3. Identify a strong one-liner to sum up how your product’s different from the competition and why a reader will need it. The rest of the copy will fall into place.
4. Check your verbs, make sure they’re strong and convey conviction (provides, not ‘aims to’).
5. Look for and strip out what will be obvious to readers (don’t start a new edition blurb with ‘now revised and updated’. Tell them what’s new instead.)
6. Read your draft copy out loud. You’ll quickly spot anything that sounds unnatural or confusing.

All of us are writing under pressure all the time but diving straight in and muddling through takes longer than a structured approach. Try taking a step back and applying these techniques and you’ll save time in the long run.

Our Copywriting Workshop is our most popular in-company training course, built around your examples, markets and challenges. Use the Contact us button above, or email rachel@marketability.info, if you’d like to find out more.

 

Excellent free Marketo report on waking up inactive email subscribers

Every healthy subscriber list will still always have a significant % of readers who’ve not engaged for a while. And ISPs will penalise you (by not delivering your emails to primary inboxes) if too many subscribers haven’t opened or clicked for a year or more. We should all be planning regular re-engagement campaigns.

Now that GDPR is behind us we can all move on to thinking about email best practice generally, hurrah! This free Marketo report is an excellent summary of the why and the how to plan for re-engaging, with useful practical tips along the way. Highly recommended.

Read more on the Marketo website.

Our Email Marketing Workshop is the place to be for more like this.

 

How the Darley Dale Brass Band proved the power of local publicity

Ten years ago this Derbyshire-based band faced closure after its members dwindled to just four – until a rallying article in the Matlock Mercury immediately swelled its ranks to the heady heights of 12. Keith Sheldon, member for over 60 years and the band’s president, cannily commented: ‘It’s great news but we still want more new members, and could do with a musical director’.

It’s easy to forget about local press when compiling press lists, but it’s much easier to get local coverage than national, and it can really generate sales. The brass band story was perfect for the Mercury, featuring a ‘local hero’, a feel-good human interest and local history story, and a personal invitation to get involved. We can get a lot of books coverage – in the national press too – by taking similar approaches.

And what of the fortunes of the Darley Dale Brass Band a decade on? A quick look at their website shows they’ve gone from strength to strength since then – and last year Keith Sheldon celebrated 70 years.

Our Practical Publicity Workshop is the place to be for more like this.

Read more about the Darley Dale Brass Band. (And why not?)

 

On The Marketability Grapevine on Facebook

• See an old red telephone box turned into a ‘book swap box’ in a village in Cornwall.
• Read something that hit the spot in this eBulletin? Click through and like the item or add a comment on Facebook
• Watch the Wall for postings of new jobs, or feel free to add to them.

Visit The Marketability Grapevine.

 

Tip of the week: If your grandmother can’t understand it …

… you need to re-write it.

Thanks to Fred Preston at SAGE Publications who volunteered this one after I quoted Einstein who said ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough’.

The tip (of course) is to remember that there’s no merit in writing copy that at least half your audience has to work at to de-code. Even academics prefer their marketing copy to be simple and jargon-free.