How to Write a Value Prop: A Different Approach

How to Write a Value Prop: A Different Approach

Your value proposition is the one thing you offer your potential customers that your competitors can’t.

Everyday writing tips: How to drop the hammer in an email

Imagine going your whole life without having to write a scathing email. Everyone would be doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. You’d be walking around satisfied with everything. And there’d be no reason to publish this particular set of everyday writing tips.

Advice for marketers, parents and marketers who are parents

Get to know kids’ jokes. This is good advice for marketers because kids’ jokes clearly demonstrate the process of creating interest, delivering a payoff and being remembered. It’s good advice for parents too, because they give your children something to laugh about other than poo.

What marketers can learn from kids’ jokes

Talking to children is not that different from talking to adults. They both want something simple they can relate to emotionally and rationally.

How to write a home page — 1 template, 3 examples

We had a tech client come to us this week with a specific problem: his home page’s bounce rate is too high. This means too many people are landing on it and leaving without getting past it. This tells Google to lower his site’s rankings because it clearly isn’t what people are looking for. It tells us he doesn’t know how to write a home page.

Why High-Quality Copyediting is So In-Demand

The US Department of Labour statistics paint a less-than-rosy picture about the future of high-quality copyediting. They say the number of available jobs in the industry is going to shrink by over three percent between now and 2028. This will represent roughly 3,400 jobs lost.

Effective writing: Getting what you want with your words

Unless you’ve successfully mastered mind control, effective writing is all you have to drive the behaviour you want. Whether they’re heard or read, they have to be convincing, true and interesting enough to maintain attention. It seems easy enough, but if you think about how many times you say no as a consumer versus how many times you say yes, it’s actually not that easy at all.

Five Ways to Improve Tech Copywriting

Tech copywriting is a funny tightrope because you have two audiences with vastly different knowledge bases: the techies and the strategists.

Copywriting showcase: Toronto Pearson Airport

A few years ago, the Greater Toronto Airport Authority (they run Toronto Pearson) had a problem with noise complaints. They needed a copywriting team to give them messaging they could point people to and say “this is why we make so much noise, these are the factors that are fully out of our control, and these are the things we’re doing about what we can control.”

Sounds easy enough. Except that we had to essentially learn about airplanes, airplane noise, acoustics and how sound travels. Then we had to learn about how Toronto Pearson works. We learned how they mitigate noise through  runways positioning, and the shared responsibility of everyone involved in getting a plane off the ground to noise abatement; from the air traffic controllers to the pilots to the airlines.

Lyrics: Copywriting Set to Music

Like great copywriting, great lyrics will make you pay attention.
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land,
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
That’s from The Times They Are a Changin’ by Bob Dylan — whose lyrics were and are so powerful that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Interesting conversation starter about that lyric:
He placed mothers ahead of fathers. Keep in mind that this song came out in 1965 when society was still patriarchal. So to put mothers before fathers was a big deal, especially for a generation that had spent the past 20 years protecting an American ideal that was being questioned by a guy with a guitar who couldn’t sing.

The Writing Revolution: 2005 to ????

Social media has done quite a number on the English language. In less than two decades, centuries of writing rules, conventions and accepted norms, most of which we were taught to treat as carved in stone, have been washed away as if they were doodled in sand.

What’s most fascinating about watching this linguistic revolution happen in real time is that it’s a first for humanity. Yes, language has clearly evolved since the grunts and yelps of early man. But in the past it’s taken multiple generations. For example, it took almost 200 years for thou, thine and thee to become you, your and yourself.