On the last day of most copywriting courses, the program director will put all the students together in a room and tell them what to expect from becoming a copywriter at an ad agency.
If they’re honest, it’ll sound like the most cutthroat, back-stabbing, ego-fuelled mess of a life one could imagine. And if the students are honest, they’re all itching to get out there.
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We recently met the next crop of youngsters at the Humber College Portfolio Show, all hoping to be the next great copywriter. As we flipped through books to find the gems in the limestone, we got to thinking about what “gem” means to us. We came up with five common traits every great copywriter has:
Read the full article…Hubspot’s latest research into email marketing puts the general B2X email open rates at 20.94 percent. This means you’re wasting your energy on at least 65 percent of your audience. That seems rather silly and worth changing. Here’s how to raise your email open rates:
Demonstrate (a) that you understand your reader’s position and (b) that you can improve it. Whether they’re in a state of need or want will determine how you speak to them, which was the subject of our latest blog post.
I don’t normally break character on our blog, but this warranted something from the heart: Ihor Pelech, my Grade 9 English teacher, passed away.
I was deeply affected by this news because of how deeply Mr. Pelech affected and impacted me.
Read the full article…Among the first lessons you’d learn in a copywriting techniques course is that consumers want to know what’s in it for them.
This article looks at how to frame that “what.”
Read the full article…“To boldly go where no one has gone before.” Powerful. Rhythmic. Iconic. And grammatically incorrect because of the split infinitive. If you ever choose to boldly go deep into the rules of grammar and ask, “What is a split infinitive?” the Star Trek reference will probably come up.
But before the split…
Read the full article…A professional bio is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have because you can pretty much guarantee that visitors to your site are going to read it.
According to Hubspot, other than the Home page, the most visited page on a website is the About page. All kinds of “experts” have postulated all kinds of reasons for this, and this is ours: visitors want to know the people behind the name. Then they want to look those people up on LinkedIn to see their history, who they know, who they’ve worked with and how they’ve added value to others.
Read the full article…Grammatically, the difference between the active voice and passive voice is the relationship between verb and subject. In the active voice, the subject is performing the action. In the passive voice, the action is happening to the subject.
Active: The man drives the car.
Read the full article…Most brand managers and marketing managers we’ve worked with over the years have told us that the best part of their job is writing the creative brief.
“Sending a creative brief to my agency and getting back a creative reinterpretation of my thoughts is so cool,” says Shauna Pichosky, now the VP Marketing and Communications at ParticipACTION.
Read the full article…Those little horizontal lines cause more headaches than any other character. So we thought it might be easier to understand the “hyphen vs. dash” deal if it was broken down with examples of how to use them.
Its main purpose is to combine two words into one concept.
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