Subbing Copy - time to revive a lost wordsmithing art?

The National Union for Journalists in Scotland have produced a bargain (imho) online course designed to teach how to produce intelligible and attractive copy, with headings that are fit for professional publication.

Touches for Sales

Sales people talk about the number of 'touches' it takes to make a sale: 'touches' being the number of nudges towards a sale that a prospective customer needs before they finally choose to buy from you. Obviously there are less touches on the way to picking up a chocolate bar with the milk, although branding and advertising touches may well influence the 'impulse' decision.

Even with seemingly simple online purchases, it can take 9 or more touches to make a successful sale. The Internet makes it much easier to deliver touches at the point the customer is making the buying decision.

But the multiplicity of touches can be very confusing if you are seeking to nail just one magic sales bullet that lands customers. Especially if you have been diligently asking new clients how they heard about you, as recommended in most business marketing guides. At best, a new customer will remember the last touch towards their purchase decision. That last touch is often just the tip of the whole publicity chain.

So what touches work? It will vary from business to business (and individual buyers) across the mix of sales, marketing and PR touches that collectively topple the decision over the sales edge into a purchase. Usually personal recommendations, enough media coverage to create buzz on and offline, good information on and offline, high visibility and plenty of new things happening, plus good connections will boost a business. The business will also need to offer an effective and available product or service at a reasonable price.

To find out more about why people buy from you, you will need to develop a relationship with customers to discover more of the marketing mix that actually drove them to you. And even then, they won't remember some of the process!

It makes sense therefore to cover plenty of ways to 'touch' your potential customers in your marketing strategy. Track what seems to be making a difference by asking new clients and by looking at the sales figures. There are hundreds of marketing, PR and sales tactics that can be deployed. Generally a mix of PR, sales and marketing tactics together deliver up to 50% more sales than concentrating individually on just PR, or on sales, or marketing on its own.

The choice of individual publicity tactics is usually a trade-off: budget v time, proven tactics v new opportunities (but if your competitors are not using a tactic, there's often a good reason for that).

Most powerful for most businesses is trusted word of mouth recommendations (on or offline) and you can enhance that with referrals incentives. But you usually need to add good marketing materials (including a good website that performs well in searches) plus social media interaction and good sales processes to reel new customers in.

Media recommendation is also very powerful as it carries the editorial endorsement factor ('as seen on TV', or 'marvellous' says The Times) and the media reach many thousands of people. Referring to that media coverage on your on and offline sales and marketing materials is important to monetise that editorial endorsement and ensure it carries on working for you.

We advise clients to run 10 on and offline sales, marketing and PR techniques at any one time, testing every 3-6 months the effects of dropping one and trying another.

See how it all works together in my next blog.

Online News Rooms

One of the first things I usually do for clients is sort out an online news room on their site with their web designer. Given all the wonderfully rich and detailed search engine content that can go up there, creating your very own online newsroom is too good an opportunity to miss. I'm amazed that even companies with internal PR advisers, or previous PR professionals, often have not got round to this. Indeed, some web designers that say they offer SEO services have asked me what an online news room is, and what should it contain.

It's really important if you want media coverage to have an online news room. Reporters rarely read releases these days: they are swamped by them. But they do what anyone does when they need information. When they're asked by an editor to write about a topic, they usually turn to Google to search for relevant information. So it really matters that you put useful content about key issues that are relevant to your industry up there in your online news room.

The online news room allows you to put up all your news releases and articles, plus background on your company, bios of key people etc. It builds up into a large body of highly relevant search engine friendly content that will really help the media write about you. And boost your website performance in online searches.

You can also add product and service background information. In fact anything a journalist might be interested in. Of course, if you have press kits, they should go up. And photos (but be sure to have a link or a request form for high resolution images as web pictures are far too small for print media). Maybe you run events that the media would be interested in? Or have good blogs, videos or podcasts that can be linked to? And financial information that you are willing to disclose - maybe about your backers (with their approval, of course).

If you run the analytics, it's amazing how many ordinary site visitors like to see what you're putting out to the media: the new room is a very popular page on a website. That means you are communicating your company progress and background to all sorts of useful people through an online news room: potential recruits, investors and clients, plus suppliers and advisers. Existing staff, friends and family will all be better able to recommend your business if they can tap into good quality information on the site. Especially if it is distilled into media-friendly factual nuggets stripped of all the marketing BS.

It's really important that people can find their way round the information in the news room, so it has to be searchable. A recent survey of journalists in the US showed well over 90% needed news search-ability on a site. At the most basic level you can put up a list of headlines with jump links to the release text below, but that will only cover a screen-shot sized list of headlines. Anything more needs to be properly searchable, but it is not rocket science as Google has a 'search this site' option you can highlight. I'm sure your web designer will come up with something more elegant if you wish.

And good PRs should be able to come up with an inexhaustible supply of ideas for releases to keep your newsroom fuelled.