reynoldswriting.com Blog

We’ve all heard the phrase, “reading between the lines.” It’s the implications in a contract, the subtext of a scene, the unspoken emotions in a conversation. The words, in fact, may be only the tip of the iceberg, the bit we can latch onto as a point of reference in a larger landscape.

So it is with copywriting.

I was reminded of this not long ago as I was wrote a sales video for a computer program. This program could boost a business’s productivity by simplifying a lot of burdensome, time-consuming tasks. I was sitting in a development meeting with the client, and we were talking about the verbiage we needed to include in describing all the wonderful things this program does, phrases that would make the viewer really sit up and take notice and say, “That’s exactly what I want.” So I’m scribbling down this superlative and that superlative and blah blah when I suddenly remembered…

This is VIDEO.

We don’t need to beat the viewers over the head with a hot and heavy voiceover. We need to see smiling faces. We need to see the businessman leaning back in his chair, his formerly messy desk all nice and clean, nodding to himself over a cup of Earl Grey as he watches this miraculous program do all the stuff that was causing him agony. (Needless to say, we need to show the agony first.) Show, don’t tell. Storytelling 101. I’m supposed to know this stuff. Duh.

But it can be easy to forget that writing is, to a great extent, the art of knowing what to leave out. Marketing writers, for instance, almost never create in a vacuum. We have to leave generous amounts of elbow room for graphic artists, videographers, web designers, or other creative partners to leap into action and do what they do best — make a visual impact.

And even then, we’re not done creating white space — because the reader/viewer/listener contributes too. Words, sounds and images start the job; the audience’s imagination finishes it. What would a radio play be without the listeners building all that virtual scenery, visualizing all those heroes, villains, and supporting casts of thousands inside their heads?

Keeps the production budget down too.

For thousands of writers around the world, another November means another novel.

In case you didn’t know, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a global scribe-fest in which writers and non-writers alike clear their desks, warm up their computers, and fry their minds for the entire 30 days of the month. Their mission: Write a short novel of at least 50,000 words. And amazingly enough, last year over 20,000 masochistic souls managed to beat the midnight deadline on the last day and claim their prize — a listing on the Winner’s Page and a certificate verifying that they have, in fact, written a bona-fide novel.

Okay, so there’s no publisher’s contract or new car or big check awaiting the winners. The fact that they climbed the mountain is the true reward. Sometimes it takes a serious challenge like NaNoWriMo to get the wheels turning. (And feel free to jeer at me because I didn’t enter. I sort of had this copywriting thing going on. And I’m lazy. Maybe next year.)

So, how do these folks sit down and bang out a novel in a month? Well, here’s their secret — they sit down and bang out a novel in a month. That’s pretty much it, as far as I can tell. Participants are encouraged not to bring in pre-outlined material or drafts they’ve already started. NaNoWriMo isn’t about crossing every T and dotting every I on your beloved dream project, and you couldn’t manage that in a month’s time anyway. NaNoWriMo is about tapping the keys madly for 30 days, regardless of the results.

As challenging as it may be to chain yourself to a desk for that period of time, your computer’s online playland makes it even harder to stay focused. Some writers use specials tools to narrow their distractions. Software applications such as Dark Room or Writeroom, for instance, turn the entire screen into a blank page — no browser begging for attention, no email waving its little flags at you. For the really hardcore cases there’s Typewriter, which allows for — well, not much. No backspacing, no deleting. All you can do is keeping going forward, mistakes and all.

Why write 50,000 words of probable drivel? By doing so, you drop yourself deep into the creative process and keep yourself there for a month — a powerful experience. You eliminate that inner editor who usually stands over your shoulder and prevents you from trying new or crazy things. Best of all, you prove to yourself that you can meet that deadline and write that book. Maybe later you can rewrite it into a good book, or maybe not. But the book exists now, and you wrote it.

Congratulations to this year’s intrepid word warriors. Now, who’s in for next year?

It may seem that I’ve been watching a lot of creepy movies lately, but I haven’t really morphed into the the Crypt Keeper; I’m just behind on my scheduled Halloween film viewing. Too bad none of my selections featured a marauding killer turkey — I’d be ready to celebrate Thanksgiving early.

The movie I just watched is the 1978 thriller Coma, directed by Michael Crichton from the novel by medical-suspense writer Robin Cook. In it, a doctor (Genevieve Bujold) suspects that her hospital is artificially inducing permanent brain death in certain patients for some mysterious purpose. She learns that these patients are being transferred to a place called the Jefferson Institute, so she decides to pay a visit and snoop further.

Bujold joins a medical tour group as a nurse leads them through the Institute. The first stop is a very ordinary-looking room with a couple of beds, the usual electronic monitors, cheery wallpaper, and warm lighting. The nurse explains that the coma victims are relocated here temporarily for loved ones’ visits because the real patient area would be “too much of a shock” for the visitors. And shocking it is — a gigantic room filled with unconscious human beings suspended from the ceiling at varying heights, horizontally, on long wires. It’s an eerie visual impression, somewhere between a morgue and a meat locker.

But the impression is false, says the nurse. The patients in this room receive state-of-the-art care and monitoring, despite the inhuman appearances — better care, in fact, than they’d receive in that charming little “traditional” hospital room.

The difference? Tone. Regardless of what’s actually best for the patients, the visitors need to see a comforting, homey environment, because that’s the tone they respond positively to.

And yes, that is our marketing moral for the day — tone matters. Whatever we’re presenting to our audience, the tone we set must be:

Professionally appropriate. We can’t sell a children’s hospital with a bunch of tech talk, and we can’t sell a high-tech engineering firm with clowns and balloons.

Emotionally appealing. What does your audience want to feel as a result of your product or service? Relief? Joy? Peace? Enthusiasm?

Vividly presented. Good marketing captures the imagination. Images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings — these sense-memories are your tools for evoking strong, specific emotions in your audience.

So much for tone. In fact, now that my Halloween viewing queue in empty, I could use a change of tone myself. So break out the clowns and balloons….

Tangent Alert: The following movie summary gets around to the subject of marketing in pretty much the most roundabout way possible.

Having delivered that warning, I wish to report on a movie I watched a few days ago, a 1968 George Pal oddity entitled The Power. In it, a scientist played by George Hamilton (I told you it was an oddity) is wanted for murder after members of his research team begin dying in all manner of eccentric ways. It seems that one anonymous member of the team registered extremely high on some sort of psychic-power test, and George suspects this mystery person of bumping the others off telepathically. (Meanwhile, certain others on the team suspect George of the same thing.) I won’t give away the ending, but there’s another wrinkle in the plot that George discovers while he’s on the run — a mysterious guy named Adam Hart, who seems to be manipulating events from the shadows.

Our psychic murderer can do more than kill; he can alter people’s feelings and erase memories. Hamilton’s character finds the widow of one of the murdered scientists blissfully drinking at home only a few days after the tragedy. She comments that not only did her feelings of grief suddenly disappear overnight, but she’s puzzled that she can barely remember what her late husband even looked like….

Okay, now I can go on to the marketing stuff. Or as Bill Cosby used to say, “I told you that story to tell you this one.”

When our target audience reads our marketing copy, we can have no way of knowing what state of mind that person is in at that moment. Angry, sad, distracted, cheerful — we have no clue where we’re treading. So we have to launch into our spiel by commanding that the reader engage in the emotion of our choice. “Hey, you know that bill payment you were fretting over just now? I order you to forget. You will now stop being fearful and depressed and become excited and happy.” You have to lead off with a statement so strong, so fortified with the emotion you wish to evoke, that it shakes the reader out of whatever other state he may be in.

Hypnotists refer to this technique as a pattern interrupt, but you don’t have to be a hypnotist to use it. We interrupt our own patterns every day. You might be whistling a happy tune one second, then struck with sudden fear as you realize you’ve missed a big appointment. One emotional state gets slapped out of place by another.

That’s what good marketing does — it takes control of the reader’s inner conversation immediately and creates its own emotional state. Yes, a gentle, reasonable argument might persuade your audience eventually, but only if the reader is already in an ideally receptive state of mind. If you don’t want to take that chance, you’d better hit the pattern-interrupt button with your first phrase or sentence.

There. I did warn you.

For my latest interview I had a chat with Brian Combs, owner of ionadas local in Austin, Texas.

WR: What is ionadas local all about?

BC: ionadas local is a search marketing and social media firm dedicated to helping local business owners promote their products and services. Our primary specialty is optimization for Google Maps listings. If you were to search for “Austin coffee shops,” for example, there might be 7 items that pop up next to the map at the top of the search results page. I help customers get found in those listings by helping them use the right keywords.

WR: How important is geography in getting your business found on the Web?

BC: It’s critically important in relation to certain keywords. About a year and half ago I was called in to help a client in the travel industry. That company was experiencing a 20% drop in Google-based traffic and about a 25% drop in sales from Google. Meanwhile, all of their ranking tools indicated that everything was fine, that they were still ranking second for this keyword or third for that keyword over the past month. We discovered that for a very large proportion of their keywords, Google was now returning the map listing. Because of the size of the map image, their listing was now being displayed “below the fold,” meaning that people wouldn’t even see it without scrolling down. This was causing a substantial drop in their search effectiveness and a disproportionately big drop in sales.

WR: So, is now the time for local companies to get onboard with Google Maps optimization to make sure they’re seen at the top of that results page?

BC: Yes. Eventually Google Maps may lose some of its value if it becomes overrun and overused, but at the moment it’s relatively unburdened by the big lead aggregators, the companies that buy leads and then sell them off — for example, Lending Tree distributes mortgage information to 3 or 4 companies. These lead aggregators have a financial advantage over an individual mortgage company that can only capture the value of that lead one time. But with Google Maps you have to have an actual physical address to get a listing, and that extra detail has kept the lead aggregators from dominating in that arena. So it’s the good old-fashioned local companies that are coming up on those queries.

WR: Tell me about your company’s setup and training services for businesses who want to manage their own social media and online marketing campaigns.

BC: Well, it makes more financial sense for these businesses to run their own search and social media marketing than to outsource it. We teach them how to fish, rather than doing the fishing for them. Also, I believe a lot of the value of social media comes from the interface between the company and its prospective customers. You can’t really outsource that direct dialogue, you have to conduct it yourself. We come up with strategic plans and train our clients on how to implement those plans.

Social media for business is very different from just chatting with your friends online — it has a lot of value as a marketing tool, but only if you take it seriously and engage the right people to come up with the right plan.