Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we do here at Coussins Associates; but if you don’t know where to start, it can be a daunting task. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to introduce you to our process for watertight copy. Whether it’s a press release, report, newsletter article or blog post you’re composing, these tips will help you to stay calm and think clearly when putting pen to paper.
So how to write good copy? Watertight Copywriting doesn’t mean waiting around for that elusive “eureka” moment, it means having a writing process that produces consistent copy, consistently! Attempting to produce a piece of writing on the future of manufacturing with no prior knowledge is a recipe for disaster, so start by going back to the drawing board and do your research.
But before you even go to type “the future of manufacturing” into your search engine of choice, consider this: two things will make your research far easier. Firstly, knowing your audience – are they manufacturers themselves or novices looking to find out more? And secondly, knowing your purpose – are you writing to persuade or inform, argue or advise?
And that so-called “eureka” moment we mentioned earlier? Well, the truth is that doesn’t really exist and your copy certainly doesn’t need to be perfectly formed in your head before it can be transferred onto paper. With the help of a little bit of planning plus sound knowledge of your subject matter, your purpose and your audience, you’ll be able to get some initial ideas and words onto the page before you know it – and that writer’s block will be totally vanquished!
Once you’ve got a first draft on the page, there are several things that you can do to give your copy a bit of extra style and polish. So here are the eight tips that make up our process for Watertight Copywriting:
- Think about your word choice. There’s nothing worse than hearing the same word used over and over again. Just because you’re writing about manufacturing, doesn’t mean you should mention manufacturing in every sentence about the manufacturing industry! Identify which words or phrases you are overusing and try and swap them out for some new ones. This is particularly important in relation to adjectives. Good adjectives that are good to work with doesn’t mean they are good to use over and over again for goodness sake. That really isn’t very good to read – is it?
- While we’re on the subject of word choice, remember this: the thesaurus is your friend – most of the time. Though a thesaurus can be a great way to inject some variety into your vocabulary, it will always suggest some words that just don’t fit your context. Be picky and consider your options…or else your copy might get a little “abstruse” – or perhaps we should say more simply – a little puzzling.
- Write for your audience. There’s really no point in using tonnes of complex jargon when writing for beginners. It may show off your knowledge, but it will also make your copy totally inaccessible. Equally, if your audience are experts on your subject matter then make sure you don’t talk down to them – patronising copy is just as alienating for readers as over-complicated copy. Remember your readers and make sure you are writing for them.
- And write for your purpose, too. If you’re creating a thought piece, make sure your point isn’t getting lost amongst statistics and quotes – your piece should be drawing towards your conclusion.
- Be clear about your point throughout – not just in your conclusion. It’s a bit baffling when a piece’s conclusion doesn’t reflect what it says elsewhere. Try and make sure that there is a logical progression through your piece to the conclusion that you are going to make.
- Be as concise as possible. Adding in extra words for the sake of it will make your copy hard to follow. Be ruthless when it comes to deleting words and sentences that aren’t necessary or relevant – even if it feels like you’re deleting lots of hard work, it will improve your copy in the end. After all, writing concisely takes much more skill than writing a long and wordy piece.
- Length can be tricky, but don’t be afraid of writing ‘too much’ or ‘too little’. If you’ve said what you need to say and made it clear and concise, as well as compelling and interesting, your piece will probably be the perfect length for its purpose – whether it ends up being 30, 300 or 3,000 words long.
- And the most important tip of all? Don’t hesitate to get a fresh set of eyes involved. You can quickly find yourself agonising over the same sentences without making much progress at all. Sometimes, the easiest way to get a fresh perspective is by looking for one that isn’t your own – you’ll be amazed at how helpful it can be to have a second opinion or even just to have someone around to test your ideas out.
Our copy has been translated into dozens of languages for emailers, websites, or for speeches spoken live to thousands of listeners, and has helped businesses in nearly every continent on the planet (sorry Antarctica, let us know if the whales ever get their fin-tech start-up together). Take a look at some of the work we’ve done previously and get in touch if you’d like to find out more.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
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This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more
The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
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April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more
March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more
Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more
‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more
We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more
Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more
It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more
The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more
If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more
After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
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The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more
When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more
In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more
Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more
In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more
It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more
Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage to buy from you, or you might want to share internal news and events with your employees.
Whoever your audience is, we’ve put together 7 steps to help you craft and distribute a successful digital newsletter.
There’s no point in writing a newsletter if your audience isn’t going to read it – unless your plan is for them to fast track the email straight into their delete folder (surely not!). Get to know your audience, and by this we don’t mean finding out where they live and stalking them, but seeing what successful newsletters your target audience subscribe to – perhaps through a survey – and then analyse their content. You can then create something comparable, or even better.
Just like with traditional newspapers and magazines, and even radio and tv shows, your newsletter should include sections that make an appearance each issue. Your reader can then easily navigate to their favorite sections and enjoy the surprises of some of your special features too.
As humans, we’re creatures of habit and routine, so we love using templates. Try creating one that you can use each issue. For example, you could always start with a message from the CEO, have a section that introduces a colleague each issue for internal employee comms, or perhaps a ‘product of the month’ section if writing for customers.
Think about it, you wouldn’t invite people round your house if it was full of clutter, and newsletters should be treated no different, so don’t invite people to read your cluttered newsletter – they’ll just turn around and walk away (in a virtual sense).
How do you avoid this – two important principles 1) concise copy and 2) white space.
People are busy. They don’t often have time for long reads, so concise copy is essential. Think about the point you want to get across, and don’t go off topic, no one likes a rambler. In design, white space is crucial.
white space
white space
white space
white space
See what we did there?
It eliminates visual clutter, especially for those reading on their phone.
Make use of branded graphics and photos to make the article more visually appealing, but don’t go overboard. The phrase less is more is particularly apt here – less elements on your newsletter spread makes it easier for people to engage, read and find your CTA.
A CTA is pretty much what it says on the tin, it is a call to your audience for them to take action. No, no cell phones involved here (that would be as creepy as stalking them), we mean placing a link with some accompanying text telling your audience to click it.
Your CTA can be whatever you like it to be, but we do recommend keeping it relevant to the aim / goal of your newsletter. For example a news item in a customer letter about your latest white paper would carry the download link and call to click for a free copy.
Now that you’ve got your perfectly crafted newsletter, it’s time to ensure it’s ready for digital distribution. You have a couple of options here. You can export the design file as an interactive pdf and attach directly to your distribution email. Or, if you’re feeling fancy, you can turn your newsletter into a flipbook. This is a virtual version of your newsletter, that will give your audience the added experience of digitally turning the page. There are many platforms you can use to create a flipbook, but here at Coussins Associates we recommend FLIPHTML5.
You don’t want to anger your audience before they’ve had a chance to read your newsletter (or after they’ve read it, in fact, we don’t recommend ever making your audience angry). Sending out your newsletter at 11pm when they’re drifting off to sleep won’t set you off on the right foot. Put yourself in their shoes and think about a time that you’d like to receive an email newsletter. When do you have time to consider and read it.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the optimum days that research by WordStream found, this gives people time to catch up on emails from the weekend, and before the Friday winddown. Also think about time of day – is morning best or is afternoon better (actually it’s mid-day between 1pm and 3pm that we are told works best).
Decide if you’d like your newsletter to be daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly and be consistent so regular readers, if you are lucky enough to have them, know when to expect their next edition.
Don’t think all the hard work is over once you’ve pressed that send button. You want to be able to track your marketing efforts: has your email been opened? Did anyone click on your newsletter? Have your CTAs been successful? You might be using marketing programs such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, in which case, you can use their inbuilt features to easily pull together data for analysis. Otherwise you may need to think about UTMs (more on those coming up) and other analytics.
We’ve worked with many clients to help create successful digital newsletters, (take a look at our portfolio here for some examples) and get in touch if you’d like to find out more.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as virtual events become more the norm, we thought we’d share our 3 top tips for effective virtual event organisation.
We’ve learnt to always think through every single step of an event in detail to look for things we might not have anticipated. For virtual events this becomes even more important.
Unfortunately, more likely than not, the glitches will be tech-related and not every person is tech-savvy! Fortunately, there are things you can try out in advance, to ensure that the “easy-fix” problems will not cause issues on the day, that we’d like to share from our own experience of running virtual events.
It’s always a good idea to plan out the user journey. No, not a literal journey – unlike an in-person event, you won’t have to pick up delegates from the airport or figure out where speakers have gone right before they’re due to present. This user journey outlines each step the attendee will experience and through that, you’ll be able to determine what their needs are and foresee any technical issues they may encounter. From there, it’s essential to do a dry run or rehearsal. This further sifts out potential hiccups and helps make it as seamless as possible for everyone. Of course, not all problems can be eliminated entirely (some issues just can’t be anticipated), but at least you’ll have dealt with as much as feasible beforehand and have back-up plans in place to help combat the unexpected.
At this point, it’s worth going through what content you’ll be sharing during your event. If you’re using photos or videos, ensure that all the media you’re using is high-quality. If you’re using presentations, ensure that they’re well-designed, clear and easy for your speakers to use, as well as interesting for your participants. Avoid presentations that are so complex or busy that people are reading them and not listening to the presentation -or, worse still, so intimidated by the overwhelming density that they do neither and get on with their emails instead. Please note complexity ≠ brilliance, quite the opposite. (You can read more about the key to great presentations design and what not to do here.)
Speakers are also a vital part of the event content. It’s worth noting that whilst being connoisseurs at presenting in-person, giving the same presentation through a computer screen requires a very different set of skills. On the technical side, it’ll take some practice to know when to click and advance the slides in order to deliver the visuals and presentation most effectively. It’s also important to plan how your speakers will be presenting – will they be speaking whilst presenting slides? If so, do you want them and the slides in the frame, just one or the other, or a mixture of both? Yes – you can control that in Zoom and other real time streaming platforms. You should also consider things like background or lighting. It’s worth making sure that they’re setup in a room with good lighting and have a good camera and microphone. However, do watch out when using virtual backgrounds – they could ‘feather’ the presenter (give them the little halos around their heads) whether you have a green screen or not and, in some cases, actually end up removing body parts like some digital mortician.
If you are viewing the presenter (and you almost certainly will at some point), will they be full-screen, close-up, standing or sitting? You might think that since it’s a virtual event, everyone, naturally, will be sitting down. However, similar to presenting in-person, when standing, speakers are more energetic and lively, which increases engagement with participants. In fact, this is one of the major differences between good in-person presenters and good live presenters. A bit like some actors who can work best on one medium or another, speakers often find virtual presentations a bigger challenge. The main reason that they don’t translate well is, that it’s much harder to convey your energy and enthusiasm over a computer or tablet screen that someone is watching in their home or office. Overall, it’s key to dedicate some time to plan and brief the speakers, so that you can ensure they’re comfortable with the whole process of presenting in a virtual setting.
Yes, we know, some of these things might seem tedious to go through and check, but this all contributes to the professionalism of your event and the lasting impression it leaves on your attendees. And not doing so may leave a lasting impression that you don’t want to be associated with.
What may seem to you minute detail, could impact the perception of the entire virtual event (and you as organisers) – even factors right down to speakers dressed properly, for example. That’s not to say a hoodie-wearing presenter is not suitable, but strictly in the right circumstances with the right audiences. I may expect a presenter who’s an expert hacker to be wearing a hoodie but not an expert on investment banking. This would be the time to show how well you understand and know your audience. These things all send messages to your attendees so it’s important not to leave these ‘little things’ out. We know a company that recently lost a seven-figure deal because a lead presenter was all hoodied up.
Want help with your virtual event? Click here. Or read more about our operational marketing services here.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form.
Writing always needs to be reviewed for style, content and most importantly execution.
Even those who think that the only thing they focus on is style and content are automatically judging you and trying to understand you based on your execution. It’s not shallow it’s automatic. If you or most importantly – your stakeholders and decision makers – notice any form of carelessness, especially if it’s in something as fundamental as spelling or text, they will inevitably begin to wonder where else they might find it.
Details in a professional context are always important!
That’s not to say informal writing – like this blog post – can afford to be sloppy. But keep your audience in mind and the kind of impression you want to make when writing and checking your work. Imagine that each member of your audience is Van Halen, relentlessly hunting for a single brown M&M!
For now, an important warning – your closest friend the trusty spellchecker is not enough to prevent disaster. The kind of mistakes only thorough proofing will catch out, the spellchecker will completely miss (you can read our top 4 tips on proofing here). The spellcheck function doesn’t protect you from meaningless sentences, writing ‘four’ when you meant ‘for’, or even ‘you’re’ when you meant ‘your’.
Some (charlatans!) would argue that it doesn’t matter how you spell something, or how bad your grammar is. As long as the point gets across, who cares, right? Wrong (or in their case, rong). The way you convey something always matters, especially in marketing. Eloquence is a virtue. Not to mention the potential effect it can have on things like SEO! Very few people search for the ‘For Seasons Hotel’ (and those who do might find themselves somewhere very unexpected!).
Having said that, although us marketing types like to think that our work is art, engaging with people on the most fundamental of levels, let’s get real. Not everybody is going to read the articulate, carefully worded, beautifully crafted digital newsletter you sent them. But you want the people that do read it to engage with it on some level – and just because not everyone will read your content, that’s no excuse for being sloppy.
At NASA, a single missing hyphen in a calculation for trajectory and speed meant the Mariner 1 exploded at take-off, causing $80 million of damage.
But it’s not just about showing how thorough you are, it’s also about clarity and purpose. Verbose, mellifluous wordage is pretty, but not very effective for communicating with people who are in a hurry and need rapidly digestible content in the fast-paced digital context we now work in. Be smart! Getting the basics of grammar and spelling correct is crucial, because if you don’t, you open yourself up to misunderstandings. For example, maybe you’re making reference to ‘the customer experience’ in an email you’re writing – depending on how you punctuate the phrase, your words could be interpreted in a variety of ways:
‘The customer’s experience was great.’ One particular customer’s experience, which may not be representative of the general ‘customer experience’. You could even mean that this customer has broad experience generally if you use this punctuation
‘The customers’ experience was great.’ This would infer that every customer had a good experience. Great news, but if it’s not what you meant to say – you’re lying!
The customer experience was great.’ Now it’s a lot more impersonal. Now you’re talking about the nebulous concept of THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE rather than one particular customer or a group of customers. Which is probably what we were aiming for.
Sure it might seem like a tiny grammatical point, you might even think it’s a little pedantic. But the implications of using something as simple as an apostrophe correctly (and incorrectly) are huge. Such subtleties are what makes the difference between good and bad writing, and the more careful you are with these subtleties, the more effectively you’ll convey your message.
If you think you could benefit from the support of a team of people who understand the importance of being meticulous and getting it right, then we could be the ones to help ensure you dot the i’s and cross the t’s when you need to the most! Get in touch with our team here.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case.
50% of all internet queries will be done using voice search in 2020
Back in 2018 Google gave voice search its greatest technological advancement yet, BERT. I’m guessing you didn’t hear about it, which is fine, pretty much no one did. But to ballpark what BERT was to voice search, go ahead and think about Good Will Hunting. It was Robin William’s character to Matt Damon’s. If you can forgive the awful attempt at a Boston accent, BERT turned something “smaaht” into something genuinely smart. Because of BERT voice search’s ability to understand human speech shot from 75% to 95%, as good as a human.
To make all this happen Google changed just one thing. Whilst I’m sure it required thousands of lines of computer code to be rewritten; to us simple marketing folk it looked like a very minor alteration. The coding aside, what Google did was shift its focus. Voice search no longer simply scrutinised the individual words within a query but tried to understand the very intent behind it, damning traditional SEO as we know it.
More than a billion searches every month are performed using voice search
Admittedly, I’m being a bit melodramatic. SEO wasn’t dead but it had been fundamentally changed. To effectively game Google’s search engine, marketers now had to take entire phrases into account, not just the key words.
My advice? Do the exact same. Research which particular phrases already bring customers to your website and how they might be easily altered into a question. To figure out which phrases are already attracting clicks, Google Search Console will clearly lay everything out for you. If you already fully understand all that and simply want these phrases altered into questions, Answer the Public can help. Take the phrase: “bars in Richmond area.” This particular site will add additional words like “nearby,” “good,” or “five star” to better explore search intent whilst helping you track it.
41% of adults use voice search at least once a day
Once the research has been done, now’s the time to start flexing your copywriting skills. Drag your inner Stephen King out of hiding, shove a keyboard in his hands, and set him to work.
First focus on your introduction. Your aim should be to get Google to put your answer / page as a feature snippet. If you’re wondering what a feature snippet is, it’s the box that pops up at the top of your Google search, immediately answering your question. To get your page featured, try following the steps I set out in my own intro. The benefits should be fairly obvious, not only will it be your answer that’s read out over smart speakers, but featured snippets on average lead to a 20-30% increase in traffic as a result.
With the introduction done, follow it up with an easily read, easily scanned body of text. As with traditional SEO, Google’s search engine will scan it line by line to make sure anyone and everyone can easily read it. Use short headlines, one to three sentence paragraphs, and bullet points, if you’re staring at a dense body of text, I’m afraid you’ve done it wrong. But if you can do all that with all the flair and polish your inner Stephen King can muster, keep your overall word count to between 1,850 – 2,500 words, and you’ll be off to the races.
22% of American smart speaker owners have purchased something using their devices
It’s trite but true, voice search is here to stay. By 2022 voice search sales are expected to reach nearly $40 billion, and if you’re going to get ahead of the game, you’ve got to get smart – not “smaaht.” To that end, I hope this helped.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock
Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all.
Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all just a fingertip away, those thirsting for this intelligence in the information supplied by these analysts and even specialist research organisations find themselves frustrated by their inability to deliver the key insights and competitive advantages that they are desperately looking for.
Why is this, and how can this situation be resolved?
In fact, the last thing this starts with is information. What you do not want, need, hunger and thirst for is information, even if you think you do. The problem for you and for businesses like yours in this, in the first quarter of the 21st century, is not too little information it is far, far, far too much. You, like most of us, are drowning in information.
In fact, the last thing this starts with is information. What you do not want, need, hunger and thirst for is information, even if you think you do.
What you want is intelligence.
That gleaming nugget of data, that essence distilled from the reams of information that provides the inspiration which enables you to develop the original, informed, insightful, and unique strategic response.
But you will be very lucky indeed if those responsible for your market intelligence, analysis and insights are able to fulfil this requirement, and especially if you start from the normal starting point for a research project, the research brief.
In fact the best starting point is too often missed by those responsible for drawing up the brief. You need first of all to consider your key strategic objectives. Implicit within these will be key questions that you need answers to if you are to realise those aims, mission and objectives.
You need to begin by finding a way to articulate these questions and this is especially challenging as they relate to what you don’t know rather than what you do. However it is worth persevering with as it is these questions that will inform your initial specification of requirements in relation to research and the key intelligence that you need to derive from it.
Once you have these you can then turn your attention to the research brief. A good research brief, well grounded in the key strategic issues facing the company, will set out:
– A problem or issues statement noting exactly what it is that the research seeks to address.
– A clear understanding of how the results will be applied commercially.
– The research objectives which state clearly and concisely the information that is required.
– Terms of reference for the study covering areas such as who is to be interviewed, the size of the sample, the start and stop dates, and any other mechanical or process issues. And finally and most importantly:
– The de-brief requirements.
All of these elements are important but it’s this last point in the brief that is one of the major keys to the relative success of the whole research project and the key to getting the very best ROI on your research investment.
You need to state that you want to see not simply the reporting of their findings and the information involved, but their analysis too. You want them to begin to prompt and provoke your thinking and the thinking of your colleagues by making recommendations, highlighting insights, challenging existing interpretations and, yes, even being provocative.
You need to state that you want to see not simply the reporting of their findings and the information involved, but their analysis too.
And you must demand that the pick out the kernel of intelligence that you are seeking in the detail of their de-brief report.
You must then demand a de-brief workshop that builds on their presentation and, ideally, facilitated by them so that they can provoke, challenge, suggest, recommend and lead you to develop your strategy, plan, tactics, positioning, or whatever it is that you need to do to make the research data actionable, practical and of direct and immediate use to your organisation.
For sure many responsible for doing gathering data will balk at this proposal, but some will relish the challenge. And it is those that can help you realise and capitalise on the true value of your intelligence investment. Only then can you begin to recover the knowledge you have lost in the information.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand.
Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour?
To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the noise. Thousands of messages are directed at us daily but most of them get ignored, overlooked or lost along the way.
What makes you stand out from the crowd is content that a customer actually WANTS to read. Information and substance that excites them and keeps them reading on – and moves them along their customer journey towards buying into your product or service or simply gaining their loyalty.
And not only that, you might have the best product, be it the most efficient, the sleekest, the most forward thinking, but if you aren’t communicating to your customers in their voice on their preferred communication platform, you’ll struggle to get their attention, and ultimately struggle to get sales.
So, before you continue doing the same thing and expecting different results, check out our top 3 tips to creating compelling content and getting it to the hands that matter!
A study in 2016 showed that people are 7.1 times more likely to purchase through an emotive campaign
Why? Because people feel first and think second. Even in relation to B2B purchases. We’re all human. You need to get into the reasons behind customer purchases. So often, competing products are similar and have the same functions but it’s the compelling copy around the product description that can drive an emotive response to buy. Simon Sinek spoke at TedTalks 2009 on the WHY, WHAT and HOW which we feel highlights this topic very well. Listen to examples of how companies have got under the skin of emotive purchasing.
Remember: When you use emotive campaigns, your consumers are now not just purchasing a product but rather an experience.
The catchphrase of 2018? Disruptive marketing.
We’re all familiar with the old adage “out with the old, in with the new”, and now, many companies are turning to unconventional messaging and events – creating disruption to grab attention and get cut through. This style of communication is used to challenge the current market or to be heard by a new one.
A great example of disruptive marketing is Dove’s campaign #RealBeauty – it disrupts the beauty industry by using real woman, rather than models or celebrities, to sell. Existing customers – and even new ones – walked away from this campaign having gained a new perspective. All in all, Dove broke through the thousands of other messages from the beauty industry to disrupt the conventional industry marketing and portray their brand in a new light.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Attributed to Charles Darwin
The pace of change is accelerating, mainly driven by the introduction of technology. The communication platform for instance, is a perfect example of evolution driven from technology.
The flow goes: letter, telegraph, telephone, text, email, WhatsApp, What’sNext?!
This is where businesses need to not only stay abreast of such developments, and adapt to the changing consumer environment, but also listen to their customers – what platforms are they using to access information, how are they searching online, how do they like to absorb information (picture, video, infographic etc) and when? All of these insights will help ensure that your content and delivery remain current and relevant to your customers.
In the UK, WhatsApp is the most popular communication App within all age groups with 84% of the 24 – 35-year olds and 78% of 35 – 44-year olds using it
Fig.1
Source: https://www.whatsbroadcast.com/content/whatsapp-facebook-messenger-wechat-app-global-user-penetration-and-statistic/#GreatBritain
So, if you’re looking for some help or advice in creating compelling content – get in touch with us today.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
First step, take the hassle out of project management and planning by getting a clever little piece of software to do if for you. Yes, it might take a bit of time to learn and get yourself familiar with, but in the long run, when projects come your way – bang! You’ll have sorted out those fancy looking, colour coded Gantt charts out in no time.
Just like you have a project leader to take charge and ultimately be the decision-maker, having someone specifically to take charge of the project plan means you’re less likely to end up with an out of date project plan, because everyone thought everyone else was doing it.
Make it easier on your team and avoid everyone looking shiftily at their feet when the project plan is mentioned, by having one person take on that responsibility.
Side-note: You may also notice communication amongst the team improves too…
Project management is not only pro-active (carefully planning out future tasks), but also re-active. Unexpected things will come up and potentially throw a curveball at your carefully constructed plan, but hey, that’s ok – that’s why you’ve already nailed motivational reason #1 (get yourself some project software).
All you have to do is go back to your project plan, update the appropriate fields, et voila! you’ll either know how best to get your project back on track, or how you might need to rethink or delay your timeline or reallocate your resources.
When you’ve got several projects on the go it’s not always easy to see which individual task on your list should be the one to tackle first. Project planning helps you and your team see who’s doing what and when so you can know who’s dependent on a particular task – avoiding project hold-ups because Sally didn’t realise that the task at the bottom of her list was crucial to everyone else’s work.
Quite often projects are commissioned on the basis of a fixed budget and we all know that efficiency of resources will help keep those costs down. So project planning is vital on this front to ensure you’re managing your team to optimal efficiency, whilst balancing it with all the other projects you’ve currently got going on.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that project planning is not only an investment that benefits your team, but also rather importantly, your client. Which, when only 29% of businesses are likely to deliver projects to budget*, makes for a pretty big differentiator.
So there we have it – 5 reasons why you should really put project planning back on your list of things to do, with regular check-ups of course. But if, after all that, you’re still not sure how you’ll fit it in, why not come and have a chat with us or check out this post on how to get started with your project plan.
We’re very accustomed to project planning, here at Coussins Associates – and we’ve been asked by a few clients to help with the management and planning of theirs. If you’d like to know a bit more, or just want to chat about some of your options, get in touch by contacting us via this link, here.
* KPMG, Project Management Survey, 2017
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?!
The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos, errors and spelling mistakes can be unprofessional, irritating to read and sometimes quite embarrassing (look no further than here and here if you need convincing of the latter, or a giggle!). More to the point, they can result in a loss of readership and more work (and expense) further down the line when it comes to fixing your mistake – if fixing it is even an option.
All in all, it seems silly to put time and effort into producing a well-informed, creative piece of copy then devalue it with silly errors – but how do you go about avoiding them?
The first thing to point out is that proofreading is definitely something more than giving your writing the “once over”. Especially if you’ve become particularly familiar with your piece, you’re unlikely to notice even the most glaringly obvious of errors from just a quick read-through.
It sounds ridiculously simple, but looking at your copy in a different way definitely makes a difference to what you notice. You might just spot a mistake that you didn’t see when it was on screen – and it reduces the chance of you getting distracted by e-mails too!
Again, sounds simple, but the less familiar your copy looks to you, the more likely you are to pick up on mistakes that you didn’t see before (and you’ll be surprised how much your copy seems to belong to someone else once it’s in another font!).
Mistakes and errors in grammar may become obvious when they are spoken aloud; and other people are bound to spot those obvious mistakes that you just can’t see anymore. You can also combine the two and get someone to read it aloud to you as you follow it on the page: that really does catch the errors.
You wouldn’t expect to read a piece of copy that gets crucial bits of information like numbers or people’s names wrong, but these are easy mistakes to make. The best way to avoid them? Double checking – even when you think you’re certain.
There’s not really a secret to the art of proofing…or maybe the secret is that you have to actually do it!
But either way, these tips should help you make sure that all your t’s are crossed and your i’s are dotted before you send that piece of copywriting to a client, your boss or – worst of all – to prent (just kidding! – to print.).
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Strictly speaking though, the origin of hashtags (outside the US catalogues – where it was used to signify part numbers and phones – we all recall the ‘joy’ of automated phone calls, “please enter your reference number, followed by the hash key…”) can be traced back to Internet Relay Chat networks (a bit like instant messaging) during the late ’80s. Used for similar purposes as today, they were used to group channels or topics. The first use in social media, however, didn’t happen until around two decades – yes, you read that right – later.
In fact, it wasn’t until 2007 that the first use of a hashtag (as we know it now) was recorded. 11 years later and hashtags are everywhere; all over social media from Facebook to Instagram and occasionally even popping up in everyday speech (hashtag please don’t).
And for that we can be thankful to Chris Messina – ex-Google, ex-Uber and open source advocator. On the 23rd August 2007, Chris posted the following message on Twitter:
And from there, the hashtag was born. Interestingly though, it took Twitter nearly two years to adopt their use as a way to categorise and access tweets from the Twitter search bar. During these two years, hashtags were used to spread awareness of forest fires, conferences and were also associated with Obama’s 2008 election campaign with #YesWeCan.
Other famous hashtag campaigns since that momentous fateful August day include: #ShareACoke which saw Coca Cola bottles with personalised names on them, #nomakeupselfie by Cancer Research UK, the #icebucketchallenge for the ALS Association, Always’ #LikeAGirl and #ThisGirlCan by Sport England.
What’s noticeable is that the majority of these campaigns have three things in common:
Hashtags are not just about tagging or grouping conversations anymore, like they were back in the ‘80s, or even in the early days of their 2007 reinvention. Whether we like it or not, those that can find themselves easily rolling off the tongue and into everyday conversations are those that are more likely to succeed as a ‘brand’.
Funnily enough, the more awareness real brands can get out of their hashtag campaigns outside of social media i.e. the more people talk about the campaign offline, the more interaction and traction they’re likely to get with their audience online. Successful hashtag campaigns, therefore, are not just limited to the digital world and it would be a mistake to think otherwise.
Moral of this history lesson? Never underestimate the power of that little symbol known as the hashtag.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.