CopyDiva

Chances are pretty good that at some point, your department or company will need to work with an outside writer. Some reasons to hire a professional writer:

• you don’t have writers on staff
• you need a specialist — a scriptwriter, a Web content writer or editor, an email marketing specialist, etc
• you’re overwhelmed with too many projects for your existing writing staff
• you need someone who can see the forest from the trees — someone who can look at your positioning with an outsider’s eye

Whatever your reason, it helps to know how to work with a writer to get the best results. What follows are some guidelines to help you forge a good working relationship.

Bring’em in early

When at all possible, bring a writer in during the conceptual stage to bring in the outsider’s eye and ideas early — it works to your advantage. Allow all players of the assembled team — designers, strategists, and the writers — to work together to create communications that will really work. All too often concepts get left to the design team, with very little consideration to what the particular audience needs to get your message. Give designers a verbal stage on which to address the concept.

Develop a creative brief for high-profile projects

Having a signed-off creative brief just eliminates miscommunication later on. This is good place to formalize the goals of the project, and the key components needed. It doesn’t need to be long (that’s why its called a brief), but there are some important elements, including target audience, budget, deadlines, style guidelines (if any), communication goals. Clearly, a good creative brief for a large web site will be more detailed than one for a trade ad.There are certainly projects that don’t need a creative brief — e-newsletter articles come to mind, or press releases. But, you probably already have something written up that explains the goals, style, etc for these. Provide this information to a writer.

Don’t edit by committee

Don’t let the project get away from you! If your company routes to everyone including the office manager, you’re in trouble. The best marcom efforts are handled by a small group of competent people — that’s it. Of course, there are peripheral players — those that need to review copy for accuracy, legal or regulatory considerations, etc.If you have a regulatory requirement, route copy close to the final draft — don’t send it each time the writer produces a new draft.

I have a medical client who does it this way: first draft goes to product managers, then back to the writer, then to regulatory, then back to the product managers. This helps eliminate regulatory issues within a reasonable timeline.

If you need to send the copy through engineering for technical accuracy (a really good idea), make sure to tell the engineers or product managers you want comments on technical accuracy only. Otherwise, you’re bound to get their opinion of the copy,
which may not be pertinent to your target market. Don’t give them the expectation they’re in the business of headline re-writes — you’ll just be frustrated with the end result.

Rules for routing:

1. Be specific about the kind of feedback you need — technical accuracy, grammar, corporate tone, etc.
2. When humanly possible, resolve internal conflicts about the copy BEFORE sending it back to a writer for editing. Don’t leave it to the writer to resolve an internal dispute UNLESS this writer understands your corporate dynamics well and is respected enough within your company to exert influence.

At this same medical products company, my job is to help resolve content conflicts between product managers and marketing managers. But, I have also worked with teams where it makes more sense for them to hash it out without me.

Trust your experts

Don’t hire a writer if you’re just going to end up writing it yourself. Professional writers with experience usually have a good idea what works. Give your writer the information needed to do the job right for you: your product benefits, your target market, your unique selling point, your goal for the piece. Then, let the writer do their job.

Give concrete feedback on copy

If you say to me, “I don’t like it, but I’m not sure why,” you give me nothing to work with. Without concrete feedback, you can’t get the kind of changes you want. Try to think of specific things to critique, such as:

• The writing is too technical; the target audience has only a high-school education
• This doesn’t address the key benefits
• This is too long, it needs to be trimmed down

Be specific with your comments if you want to see changes made.

The best working relationships involve clear direction and honest communication between the client and the writer. Hopefully, these tips will help you create a productive and successful relationship with a writer for your next marketing project.

Although you may be under the impression that marketing’s job is to promote the company/product/service, I am here to tell you that, in fact, that’s not it. Marketing’s job is to be the audience advocate, to focus on the needs, wants, desires of customers and prospects, to get that essential information they’re looking for into their heads so they can perhaps make a decision to take the next step. In today’s world, people are just too darn cynical to ever be convinced by fluff language, product glamour shots or any of the staid tools used to convince business folks to consider your product or service.

Ok, so how can you be an audience advocate? Well, one of the ways I do this when I am formulating my writing is by resisting the constraints of formats, grammar, punctuation — the rules of writing. Instead, I stay right brain and save the left brain stuff for later. Truly the way to get the best ideas out is to let them flow unconstrained, without
judgement.

If you’ve ever been in a brainstorming meeting choked by nay-sayers, you understand what I mean. You know, those people who shut down tossed out ideas because they don’t quite seem to fit. I say, leave all the ideas up on the white board. Sure, they may go away later, but that one seemingly random thought could spur genius ideas from others in the room. If you cast it aside, you’re sure to shut down possible ideas or key points people have. Plus, it makes everyone else afraid to contribute ideas.

In the work I do, I spend a lot of time in conversation with product managers and marketing managers who sometimes get a bit hung up on HOW to say what they want to say. When this happens, its my job to be the audience advocate and assure them that, yes, I can figure out the wordsmithing part. What I need from them is their ideas, not their wordsmithing.

So remember to be the audience advovate. When it comes to creating sales support, marketing and especially web content, it’s so important to focus on what the customer wants to hear, not what you want to tell them. That’s your job as the advocate.