excess voice: nick usborne's blog

When clients want your skills, but not your brain.

Companies generally hire me because of my experience and skills as an online copywriter and optimizer

Let's say they want me to rewrite a home page.

Before I start writing the page, I'll spend a lot of time thinking about it. I'll think about the people arriving at that page. I'll think about what those visitors are looking for. I'll think about what their first impressions might be as the page loads for the first time. I'll think about how the page connects with every other page.

Then I'll think of the business owner's goals for the site. I'll think about what he or she wants new and returning visitors to do.

Finally, I'll look for the point at which both the visitor's and the site owner's interests intersect.

I'm in good shape now to start writing and making a few design recommendations.

I might even be quite pleased by what I have done.

Then the client takes a quick look at it and says something along the lines of, "This isn't what I had in mind. I'll need you to make some changes."

I'll explain my thinking, but to no avail.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the client is always wrong. But I have had numerous experiences where I realize, too late, that my real job - for which I'm being paid - is not to find that intersection point where visitor and business interests intersect.

I'm being paid to give the client what he or she wants.

I really hate it when that happens. I try to sniff out these kinds of jobs before they start, and back away. But I still get caught sometimes.

Desktop Marketing – a course for freelancers who want to increase their income by offering writing AND design services.

I just finished reading through all 500 pages of this course, and I like it a lot.

The purpose of the course is to broaden the services freelancers can offer their clients.

In particular, it’s perfect for copywriters who want to offer design services. And goodness knows, there are a zillion small companies out there who would love it if their favourite copywriters could also offer a design service.

I was a little cautious as I started reading the course, as I have quite a strong aversion to “amateur” design.

And then I found the real gem at the heart of this course. Whoever wrote all the information on how to design a attractive page that communicates well seems to share my own views and feelings on the topic.

That is to say, the course promotes a classic style of commercial design. The kind of design that communicates quality as strongly today as it did twenty years ago and fifty years ago.

There is even a whole section on typography. From what I see, typography is a dying art. So it’s great to see it being taught and promoted in this course.

I have plenty more to say on the topic and you can read my review of Desktop Marketing here...

Marketing Clichés #1: “Improving the user experience”.

This is the first in what will likely become a series.

Web writers and/or their managers love to use language that puts a positive spin on company-centered “improvements”.

One such spin is the growing number of sites which announce some new feature and then describe it as “improving the user experience”.

Usually this is complete nonsense. The change or upgrade is almost always made to serve the needs of the company and improve its revenues.

But writers and/or managers love to be “hip” to Web 2.0 lingo, so they spin the announcement to include phrases like “enhanced user experience” and “better interact with our visitors.”

For your amusement you can see 79,000+ examples by searching on Google for “improved user experience”.

There is a timeline in the birth, growth and decline of these phrases.

• Someone uses the phrase legitimately and truthfully.
• The phrase appeals to other marketers and they start to use it as well, more or less truthfully.
• A usage “tipping point” is achieved, and tens of thousands of marketers jump in and use the same phrase, with increasing degrees of dishonestly.
• The phrase starts to lose all meaning, it fades into “blah-blah land”, and the original user of the phrase has to edit his or her site and say the same thing in a new way.

The godfather of all these phrases is probably “integrated solutions”, with 1,780,000 results on Google so far.

Which are your favourite marketing clichés, and what are their Google counts?

Please share.

Make the gift match the relationship

I received a direct mail package from my cell phone service provider this morning.

It was a nicely produced piece in an invitation-style envelope, including a short letter thanking me for being a loyal customer for a number of years.

In return for my loyalty, they offered me a choice of free gifts.

Sending the letter was a good idea. It’s easy to switch providers, and it was smart of them to thank me and offer a gift.

The trouble is, the gift choices sucked.

Gift choice #1: A pouch for my cell phone. Like I don’t already have half a dozen of those gathering dust.

Gift choice #2: A 6-month subscription to a magazine. Sure. I can get the same offer from a dozen places online.

Gift choice #3: A music CD. Are they kidding? Why not offer me some free downloads instead?

As soon as I read the list of gift choices, I dropped the package in the garbage.

And that’s a pity, because I toss 99% of junk mail without even reading the outer envelope.

These guys achieved the near impossible of getting me to actually read the letter and then glance at the brochure with the featured gifts.

I was feeling positive right up to the moment I saw the gift choices. And then those positive feelings turned to negative within the blink of a neuron.

The moral of the story is, if you’re going to try to hold onto your customers with a gift offer, make it meaningful. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does have to have some perceived value and meaning.

Like everyone else, I like free gifts. I just don’t like to be insulted.

"Feel like a Customer again."

This is the tag line to a radio commercial I heard over the weekend. It was for an electronics store. Not a big box store, but something a little smaller, and more friendly.

At least, I think the tag line is trying to tell me they are more friendly.

There is a problem with this line. And the problem begins when language from a company’s marketing group or ad agency begins to leak out into their advertising.

Marketers think of those people who buy from their stores or their web sites as “customers”. It’s the language they use as marketers. They talk about customer satisfaction, and customer feedback.

But what do regular people feel? How do they view themselves as they walk into your store?

More specifically, to a person’s ears, does the line, “Feel like a customer again” make sense or ring true?

Do I want to feel like a “customer” again? Do I not feel like a customer when I buy from a big box store?

Or put it this way...as a regular person, do I differentiate between big stores and small stores by the degree to which I am made to feel like a “customer”?

I don’t think so.

I can see what the ad is trying to achieve. But they have picked the wrong phrase and wrong word.

It’s not about people feeling like customers...they feel like customers wherever they shop.

It’s about how comfortable, confident and trusting they feel.