reynoldswriting.com Blog

“Wow,” says FBI Agent Peters to her colleague Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) the first time she meets him in the flesh. “You look a lot like your surrogate!”

No, Greer isn’t paying someone to carry his baby. Surrogates, in director Jonathan Mostow’s film of the same name, are lifelike androids built to live out the everyday lives of humans, who direct the surrogates’ actions through a mental link. See, now that practically everyone in the world can afford a synthetic lookalike, humans need no longer face work-related injuries, traffic accidents or other hazards. People sit or recline safely at home, connected to an electronic interface that lets them see, hear and feel through their surrogates’ artificial senses and perform their daily tasks via surrogate arms and legs. You can even customize your surrogate with any features you prefer — and of course this has led to a society peopled (surrogated?) by model-gorgeous men and women. That’s why Greer’s partner is so surprised. Who would want to look like himself?

Greer’s wife certainly wouldn’t. Maggie Greer lives with disfiguring scars from an old accident, or rather she refuses to live with them. She stays in her locked bedroom, interacting with the world — and with her husband — only through her blandly pretty surrogate. But Greer doesn’t want a surrogate. He wants his wife, the woman he fell in love with and married. He wants the real person hiding behind the image.

When you create a brand for your business, you build a persona, an avatar designed to project a calculated image to your target market. That image is the public face of your company. If you run a personality-based business, however, your clients will ignore generic branding statements. They want to know and work with you, based on your skills, experience and personal values. People work with me, for instance, because of my track record, the fact that I’m easy to work with, reliable and so on. I am my brand.

If people respond to your business specifically because they respond to you as an individual, than you must try to make your own positive traits shine through your company’s branding. Make sure your surrogate walks, talks and looks like you. Then when your client meets the person behind the image, they won’t feel surprise or disappointment — just a comforting familiarity.

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

Ever feel like you’re repeating the same day over and over again — and not a particularly pleasant or productive one? Has the groundhog gotten a glimpse of its shadow and high-tailed it for the comfort of his living room, leaving you to experience more of the same old situation instead of looking forward to a change? If so, then you’ll sympathize with Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, even if you don’t like him much.

That’s TV weatherman Phil Connor’s problem, in fact — he’s just not a likable guy. in fact, he’s an arrogant grump who resents his assignment to cover celebrity groundhog Punxsatawnie Phil’s prediction for winter’s end. The only way his February 2nd could get any worse would be if it happened again. And then the morning, it happens again, and again and again. He keeps having the same conversations with the same people until he’s literally ready to kill himself.

Eventually, however, Connor realizes that this bizarre Groundhog Day has its upside, because he has an opportunity to become the kind of man his beautiful news producer Rita would find ideal. He spends February 2nd after February 2nd learning to speak French, create ice sculptures, play the piano and so forth. Along the way he comes to know and appreciate the people around him. By the time the calendar finally does start moving forward again, he’s a new and better person.

If you feel paralyzed in your attempts to grow and market your business, maybe it’s because you’re trying to master everything at once. A full-scale marketing campaign, for instance, can be an intimidating thing to envision, build, launch and manage. I don’t now about you, but when I see an insurmountable hurdle dead ahead, I stop in my tracks and think twice before surmounting it.

At times like these it may help to take a page from Phil Connor’s playbook. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, goes the old joke. Director Harold Ramis estimates that Connor relives at least 30 or 40 years of Groundhog Days to master all the new skills he displays. You can become effective at marketing your business in far less time than that, and you can do it incrementally. Get the website done. Get your print marketing looking sharp. Learn how to use social media. Sharpen your networking skills.

If you screw up you can always make repairs, learn from the experience and keep going. But unless you do something every day to move forward and improve your marketing knowledge and skills, your business will remain frozen in place, experiencing the same day over and over again. Phil Connor broke out of that loop — and so can you.

Here’s to an early spring!

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

Ah, Google — keeper of the sacred, secret formulae that determine whether your website link appears on Page One of the search results, above the “fold” so viewers don’t have to scroll down to see your listing, or at least higher up on the list than your competitors’ links.

Year in and year out, companies try to crack the Google-relevance “secret code,” throwing all sorts of strategies at the search giant’s algorithm to see which ones get results. If you’ve ever sat down with a web strategist, you’ve heard about how important it is to optimize your website so that Google rewards you with a higher ranking in search results. And it’s true. People don’t just search for products, services and information, after all — they “google” them. I should be so lucky: “I need to Reynolds my company’s marketing content.” Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Why, then, do even the most skilled and experienced web professionals find Google such a tough nut to crack? Because Google remains a moving target, that’s why. The company constantly tweaks its systems, with the result that yesterday’s great “Google buster” strategy becomes today’s disappointing search result. I recently wrote up the results of an exciting, cutting-edge study performed by a web optimization company, only to watch the owners go pale as Google suddenly changed the way it did things once again, rendering all their hard work yesterday’s news before the study could even hit the news feeds.

What can you do to remain in the sights of this attention-impaired giant? Well, you certainly want to make sure your web provider stays on top of all the latest industry news and builds enough flexibility into your site to enable fast, easy updates. This flexibility enables another great, all weather-strategy for online success — a steady stream of fresh, useful, well-written content.

In fair weather or foul, regardless of what Google’s algorithm of the moment seems to favor, engaging and useful written content will always make your web presence more, well, present. You’ll find that visitors don’t just land on your page — they actually read it. They stick around. They might even contact you and buy stuff.

Now, that’s relevance!

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

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.

Now that the holiday season has arrived, many of us will find ourselves reading roadside billboards and other signage to stave off the boredom of the road. We will view countless holiday ads online and in print, and if we own a business we may even create some ourselves. If we’re in a hurry to beat a deadline, we may rush the copy to the printer after a quick pass through a spell checker. Bad idea.

Proofreading matters, if only because the errors you pump out will live forever on the Internet. Even if you’re producing a sign or advertisement in a language most of your viewing public doesn’t understand, somebody out there has devoted a humorous website to you.

Yes, your spell checker catches lots of errors, but what about that misused word it doesn’t recognize or that proper name it doesn’t have in its database? That’s why you must always give your marketing content a once-over with your own eyeballs. If your eyeballs are tired, put the content away and proofread it later. But proofread it.

Of course, you can dot every I and cross every T and still end up with a ludicrous misstatement. Somewhere along U.S. Highway 83 (I forget where) stands a roadside sign for a combination gas station and restaurant. The sign proclaims proudly — and quite seriously — “EAT HERE! GET GAS!”

You may encounter entire concepts that needed one more pass through the marketing department. How about that billboard that always seems to pop up near small towns — the one for the BBQ place that depicts a cute cartoon pig squealing in terror as he runs from a guy with a butcher knife? Sure, it’s amusing if you’re into that sort of thing, but does it really pull people off the highway with their stomachs growling? “Hey, you know that funny pig you were slashing to death? I’d like me some of that with a side of slaw.”

So consider this post a public service announcement. Don’t just run your marketing content through a spell checker and call it done. Use human eyes. And don’t just check it yourself — have someone else look at it for that extra opinion. If you really want quality assurance, you can even have a professional writer proofread and edit it. But I digress. Happy Thanksgiving!

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

In keeping with the recent Halloween festivities, I decided to re-watch the 1963 Robert Wise film The Haunting. This film enjoys a reputation as one of the few genuinely spooky examples of the “haunted house” genre. The history of the house in question contributes as much to the air of dread as the mysterious cold spots, horrific banging noises and midnight mutterings inside the walls.

A group of visitors monitor these eerie events in an effort to capture evidence of the supernatural. Hill House has remained unchanged since its deranged owner built it 90 years before; his daughter lived in the same grotesquely-decorated nursery from childhood through old age. And now that its former occupants have all died in it, the house itself has grown a personality, one literally set in stone. Sure, the nursery can be refurnished and repainted, but the source of its gloom lies deeper.

What scares us about haunted houses, anyway? Is it the idea that long-silenced voices continue to ring out, that the wishes of the dead and buried still hold sway there? Perhaps we hate the thought that the ghosts of the past can manipulate the present.

Does your business resemble a haunted house?

Think about it. You’ve grown and evolved over the years, and so has your company. And yet your marketing remains rooted in the world of What Was. Oh, you’ve refined the logo, maybe tweaked the brochure copy a few times, but the face lift hasn’t taken. The Ghost of Marketing Past still runs your house — and the branding that fit like a glove years ago becomes less relevant to your current business with each passing day.

Sometimes small changes yield big results, but merely changing the window dressing on your marketing may not be enough to bring your brand back into alignment with present-day reality. It may be time to call in an exorcist — to pull out the old marketing by the roots, demolishing that old house and rebuilding on a new foundation.

Halloween’s over. Evict your marketing ghosts!

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

I pride myself on being a relatively “high-bandwidth” copywriter who can produce quality content while juggling multiple clients and jobs. Once in a while, though, if the pipeline becomes too clogged I have to refer a client to another writer. (I try to maintain good relationships with other writers, and I’m happy to send work their way when the opportunity presents itself.) The client will either nod and agree that it’s time to bring a second writer on board, or his eyes will bug and he’ll say, “Why don’t you want to work with me?” because he thinks I’m trying to dump him.

I don’t want to dump anybody. I’m happy to keep writing as much as I can for that client. But when the workload (his or mine) becomes overwhelming, I can’t continue as the only horse pulling that increasingly heavy cart. It’s time to hitch up the rest of the team.

Hey, when that day comes, congratulate yourself. If you have an ongoing need for marketing content, then your company is moving and shaking and promoting itself — or if you’re a marketing agency, then you’re building your business and gaining clients. Well done. But now you have to think about covering all your bases. A football team doesn’t consist of the bare minimum of people needed to take the field; there’s the first string, and then a second string and a third string standing by to replace a fallen player. Well, your marketing department needs depth too.

How do you maintain brand unity when you have multiple writers? Your marketing director acts as Editor-in-Chief and Head Branding Honcho, coordinating the writers’ assignments and making sure everyone’s work conforms to the company’s overall tone and message. You gain extra creative brainpower as well as the luxury of casting from strength — instead of putting all the burden on one generalist, you might have one writer who focuses on blogs, another who excels at brochures, and so on.

Best of all, the use of multiple writers allows your marketing agency or department to grow as big and as fast as you want it to. Once you have a team, and a plan for managing the team, the sky’s the limit. And if they’re all freelancers you can just assign them as you need them, growing at your own pace without having to add to your permanent staff.

In the meantime, if you only need one writer, you know where to find me.

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

“I have a great idea for a play.”

I’d seen many such examples of greatness as a script reader in the literary management office of the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey — greatness piled from floor to ceiling along all four walls, massive stacks of greatness that would take years to slog through.

But the actor persisted. “It’s my grandfather, you see. My grandfather has lived this amazing life….” He then proceeded to describe a lengthy succession of Munchausen-esque events that did indeed describe an amazing life. I don’t remember the details now, but I imagine that they included sailing on the Titanic, battling headhunters in the Amazon, scoring eight touchdowns in one game, discovering a fortune in diamonds, curing the pox — you get the idea.

I was impressed. “It’s an amazing life, you’re right,” I said. “But what’s the story?”

A story is more than a laundry list of events. It uses events to illustrate a continuous, shapely progression toward a destination. We’re clearly heading toward something, and at the climax we finally get there. All the pieces make sense in relationship to each other, allowing the author to build toward a culminating point. Otherwise you have what amounts to a six-year-old recounting his dream: “And then we got chased by a bear and made friends with dinosaurs and Santa Claus came to visit and we all ate cake and then the sun blew up….”

And the fact that you’re writing a website or brochure instead of the Great American Screenplay doesn’t get you off the hook — you still have to tell a story. I see many, many marketing pieces that just slap endless lists of features and benefits together randomly like darts thrown at a board during Happy Hour. You have to present your core theme, connect your supporting statements so that they keep your reader floating along in the right direction and at the right speed, and increase the interest and excitement levels until the reader lands at the climax — your call to action — and responds appropriately.

That’s when you’ve got a hit on your hands.

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

Entrepreneurship has been good to me, in more ways than one. I regularly write for independent representatives who sell insurance, health products, packing and shipping services, you name it, as franchisees or independent representatives of a major national brand.

Wait a minute, I hear you saying. (Or maybe not, but humor me.) This person sells a nationally recognized product or service and still needs marketing content? Surely an industry leader with a zillion-dollar marketing budget pumps out all the web content and print marketing collateral it needs to remain visible year in and year out. Surely such a household name can sustain its own marketing momentum.

Well, that’s absolutely right. A big-name franchise can take care of itself — but does it take care of you, the independent business owner?

I can’t tell you how many times a client has said to me, “I sell XYZ National and they give me all this marketing content that explains what it is, what it does and how to buy it. But none of this stuff promotes ME.” If you’re selling that household name in a major metropolitan area, chances are you can find a thousand others selling the exact same thing — with the exact same cookie-cutter marketing copy. If you don’t do something to make yourself stand out, you’ll never emerge from that crowd of anonymous salespeople pushing the same goods with the same company colors and the same business card and the same everything else.

Sameness will render you invisible. Fight sameness by branding yourself.

Say you sell insurance through a major national provider. Well, you don’t really have to go to bat for a company already enjoying enjoying instant recognizability and a great track record, do you? So instead you go to bat for yourself. Market yourself as an independent insurance expert and offer that national provider as the flagship of your product line. This approach also lets you bring in other, related products and services under the umbrella of your own brand. The result? Your business takes the center seat, not the 800-pound gorilla you sell.

If you represent a national franchise, find that unique spin on who you are and what you do that makes you the go-to guy for your product or service. Then announce that special quality to the world — through your own customized marketing.

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

As you might suspect from its title, Tim Burton’s 1996 film Mars Attacks! does not quite present the world as we know it. This nod to 1950s monster movies lives in its own special reality — a reality in which creepy Martians blast humans into skeletal husks with ray guns, the voice of Slim Whitman can turn said Martians’ heads into goo, and the President of the United States looks and sounds uncannily like Jack Nicholson. Weirdness reigns supreme as an all-star cast struggles to save Earth from a Martian invasion.

Yet even a fun-house mirror reflects a kind of truth. A prime example in this film is a scene that shows the Martians gunning people down in the streets right and left while broadcasting over a loudspeaker, “Don’t run! We are your friends!”

Ludicrous, yes. But people do it all the time, don’t they? I’m not talking about gunning each other down in the streets, though there seems to be plenty of that as well. I’m talking about mixed messages.

We do it all the time, often subconsciously. Our words say one thing, while our actions say something else. That guy giving the speech smiles serenely, but his hands are shaking. The lady testifying in court sounds absolutely sincere, but her eyes are darting nervously around the room. We do it in our everyday body language — and we do it in our marketing.

You might want to take a careful look at the various forms of messaging you employ on the Web or in your print marketing. Is the message congruent? For instance, does your website content scream excitement while the surrounding graphic design presents all the pizazz of Grandma’s faded wallpaper? Do you describe yourself as a sophisticated, upscale consultant while using whiz-bang terms better suited to a kid’s cereal box? Do you brand yourself as the friendly, caring choice in a tone that could refrigerate a side of beef?

An inconsistent message is no message at all. Conflicting statements cancel each other out to produce white noise, while statements that complement a single message amplify that message’s power. Want to make a specific impression? Align all the components of your marketing message into one unified clarion call. Otherwise you simply won’t hold people’s attention — with or without a ray gun.

Okay, maybe with a ray gun.

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