reynoldswriting.com Blog

You know that powerful new marketing campaign you’re unveiling in 2011 — the one that will help you turn your business’s fortunes around, build upon current successes, or establish you as a new player in your industry?

Well, here’s a gentle reminder: 2011 starts in January. January 1st, to be precise. Have you got that shiny new marketing ready for rollout?

A strong, comprehensive 12-month marketing campaign typically involves some combination of several individual elements — copywriting, graphic design, web development, social media platforms, multimedia presentations, et cetera. These elements work in concert to create a coherent, cohesive statement about your company. So as you can imagine, this stuff doesn’t fall together overnight. You have research to do, battle plans to construct and several skilled professionals to corral. If you haven’t put the pieces together by now, your marketing calendar could miss the starting gun for the new year.

But don’t panic. If your dreams ran ahead and left your implementation behind in 2010, all is not lost. You can still assemble your creative team and produce some interim or “pilot” marketing pieces to keep yourself visible until that bigger machine powers up. Remember, a professional copywriter or graphic designer can dream up brilliant content in a fraction of the time you’d spend at the drawing board yourself. And a good copywriter can also refer you to plenty of other marketing pros to help you move forward.

Even if you can’t get your full-scale blitz going by January 1st, you can still do something. So — do something!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

I have fielded phone calls from a few prospective clients that felt like job interviews: “Tell me why I should go with a professional copywriter instead of writing this stuff myself.”

I could, I guess. I could tell those people that a professional copywriter can produce more powerful and effective marketing content in a fraction of the time it would take them to stumble to the finish line. I could point out the cost-effectiveness of outsourcing such a job while the client stays productive doing what he does best. I might even suggest that he wouldn’t be calling me at all if he relished the thought of writing his own copy.

But I don’t do any of these things. Why? Because by and large, people either get it or they don’t. The ones that don’t will not become my clients no matter how I respond. The ones that do are only asking that question to hear a validation of what they already know.

A recent blog by copywriting guru Peter Bowerman makes this very point. Bowerman calls this phenomenon “The Salad Dressing Rule.” If you sell salad dressing, he says, you can make better use of your time selling to people who already eat salads than struggling to convert people into salad eaters so they can buy your product. With the time and effort you put into creating a new veggie lover, you could’ve sold umpteen bottles of dressing to the folks who load up their grocery carts with Romaine lettuce every time they shop.

I would even argue that some copywriting clients who think they get it actually don’t. If someone asks me to serve as little more than a transcriptionist, for instance, that client may not understand the full value of drawing on a creative professional’s experience and expertise. Or the client that enthusiastically hires a copywriter and then keeps trying to wheel and deal for a lower price or “special rate” — this person does not truly value the work as something worth paying good money for.

So I no longer plead my case on those initial inquiries. I’ll direct people to my online portfolio, submit additional samples if requested and send over my current rate sheet. The rest is up to them.

Hope they like salad.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.