Smart Marketing

The basics on marketing copywriting; An interview with Rick Holton

I recently caught up with marketing copywriter Rick Holton to ask him some questions about how to effectively write marketing copy. Listen to what he says:

Why is writing so important to a business’s marketing efforts?

People don’t respond to messages they can’t understand or that don’t apply to them. Because you have only a few seconds to catch and hold a reader’s attention, your marketing writing will succeed if you:

•  Write clearly and get straight to the point

• Make it clear why your product or service is important to the reader

• Look at the issue frfom the reader's point of view, and

• Use format effectively.

 
What are the most common mistakes businesses make when writing their marketing copy? How can they be avoided in the future?

 The single most common mistake small businesses make is not planning adequately. Before marketing their goods or services, they must identify what it is they are really selling, who their target market is, and what motivates that audience. It’s difficult to persuade someone if you don’t know what motivates them.

This sounds obvious, but I learned it myself the hard way. I started out by thinking that I was selling just writing services, although I occasionally sold training services to get my foot in the door. It turned out, however, that companies started inviting me back, not to write, but to do more training, and I realized I was missing out by not promoting my training services better.

I also thought that my biggest target market would be engineering firms, since their writing is often difficult to read, especially for the layman. It turned out that 90 percent of them didn’t know they had a problem and that most of the rest thought it wasn’t worth spending money to fix. I was selling to people who were almost never going to buy.

You can avoid the mistakes I made by writing a marketing plan and doing enough research up front to segment your target market and find out what motivates them.

If businesses address these issues, what can they reasonably expect?

 If you plan carefully before you start writing marketing copy, your marketing copy will improve dramatically. This is all the more important for a small business that doesn’t have a team of dedicated marketing professionals on staff.

 
In your opinion, who was the best marketer of all time?

My former business partner, Gaile Haessly would definitely get my vote . She wrote our marketing plan, she helped me refine our marketing mix, and most importantly, she put everything on a timeline, both the easy things and the hard things, and she made sure we did them.

 
Did she know everything a small business needed to have in its marketing program? Pretty close. Was she a better marketer than Oprah or Martha Stewart or Genghis Khan? (choices put forth in my blog entry “Who was the greatest marketer of all time?”) Probably not. But great marketing, in my opinion, is measured by its follow through; and she was a master at that.

Rick Holton provides writing, editing, and training services for businesses, nonprofits, and government. He helps them craft better sales and marketing materials, web content, sales proposals, grant proposals, newsletters, articles and whitepapers. For more information, see his website at http://www.holton.cc.

 

 

 

Unique selling proposition and positioning

Yesterday I gave a speech to the Louisville Direct Marketing Association entitled The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses. During the course of it, an interesting question came up about the differences between Unique Selling Proposition and Positioning. Here's how I tried to explain it:

Unique Selling Proposition - Is a term introduced by Rosser Reeves in the early '60s. It's typically defined as a marketing strategy that focuses on a particular attribute of a product or service that's  distinctive to a brand and offers a significant benefit to the buyer.

Positioning - Is the art of fitting a product or service to market segments so that the product is meaningfully set apart from the competition.

In my mind, using a Unique Selling Proposition is a tactic that's is part of the overall strategy of positioning a product in a buyer's mind. But this field is so wide open to interpretation that I thought I'd get your opinions on this. Did I get it right? What did I miss?