That led me to think about unlikely-seeming services that actually make perfect sense. What about, for example, those cheerful-looking little pickup trucks manned by folks who pick up dog poop? Now, I’ve dog sat over the years and have done my share of that. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that dog owners couldn’t perform that task themselves. On the other hand, if you’ve got more than one (big) dog and delicate sensibilities, perhaps hiring someone to do it for you is not such a bad idea.

In my own copywriting business, I’ve helped clients out with website QC. I check spelling, grammar, and whether or not links work. It’s great fill-in work, particularly when the famine part of the freelance feast-or-famine cycle hits. It’s a great way to sharpen my attention to detail and improve my ability to be systematic, and of course it’s a bona fide, legitimate service.

How might you use your business as a springboard for new offerings?

Ms. Hayden believes that many struggling business owners may not be selling what people—or at least what their ideal customer—want to buy. She presents the example of a graphic designer who marketed identity packages to small, new businesses but discovered that they weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate high-quality creative work. They were, instead, in search of the lowest price. When she shifted her focus to offering the types of services that larger, established companies needed—such as annual report design and customer/employee communications —her business grew fast and profitably. She also differentiated herself from her competitors.

In this and two other worth-reading vignettes, Ms. Hayden notes that the business owners who applied this principle successfully continued to use the skills they had developed. They continued to attend the same networking events, continued to meet with the same people for coffee, and in other ways, did pretty much the same things they had been doing. What changed was what they were marketing.

In her words:

“Maybe it’s time to re-examine not how you are marketing, but what you are marketing. Marketing the right stuff can allow you to find better clients with less effort. What’s the stuff that your ideal clients really want to have?”

I leave you with that thought, but I’m really curious to know how you’ve applied this idea to your business.

He talks about a simple four-step process that links a brand with consumers. In his words:

1. Define what’s uniquely valued in your brand
2. Define the personas of your customers
3. Build a strategy for connecting to these personas
4. Create the channels and stay in touch

This is great advice. Defining personas, in particular, resonates with me. It’s more than a mere marketing nicety to consider who you’re selling to and put some effort into fleshing out a portrait. In fact, creating personas brings the whole concept of marketing segmentation to life.

As a copywriter who specializes in marketing communications, one of my favorite personas is the tired marketer who’s managing a product launch. There she is, at 10 on a winter evening, decked out in her fuzzy robe and bunny slippers. The kids are in bed. Her spouse is headed that way himself. But, lacking sufficient headcount, she’s sitting in front of her PC, trying to write something compelling about the new product. She knows it backwards and forwards, and she’s a brilliant strategist, but writing is not her strong suit. Or at least she doesn’t consider it a good use of her time.

That portrait, in my opinion, is a pretty doggone good persona. It accurately describes a good part of my market. And it’s helped me better focus my promotional efforts.

Have personas helped you? If so, how? If not, why?

Some of the best insight I’ve recently gotten into what motivates buying comes from Charles Green, a contributing editor to Rain Today. In his article “Pain, Brain, or Reframe: How Do Buyers Really Buy,” he lays out some recent thinking on the topic.

Generally, people buy—or so it is commonly thought:

• to fix a negative situation
• in response to a clear value proposition
• from those who offer a differentiated solution

Simple Models, Complex Situations

Mr. Green refers to these as the Pain, Brain, or Reframe models. The pain model is driven by emotion. The buyer wants to avoid or escape pain and is best sold to by appealing to her pain points or perhaps the prospect of a better outcome. The brain model draws its rationale from economics, which posits that people make decisions based on rational economic choices. (I’m not sure all economists go for this idea.) And finally, reframing draws its power from shaping customer thinking around the belief that your product really does it differently and better than the competition.

A Better Explanation?

What I took away from this excellent article is that one model just won’t do. Mr. Green cites the example of a company who was searching for a speaker for major corporate event. Decision makers came up with a business strategist and an economist and after much debate, decided to engage a hard-charging former football coach. In this case, the brain model was great for analyzing offerings and narrowing them down to a couple of choices. Then emotion entered the picture and drove the decision.

Look at any sales situation. You may start with one model, but you’ll probably end with emotion.

Quoting from Mr. Green:

“We all acknowledge rational analyses as important checks against the mistakes we might make if we rely solely on the emotions. At the same time, it recognizes the powerful role that emotions play in human decision making, of which the buying decision is just one.”

So, in the spirit of disseminating knowledge, I’m posting hints from Ilana Bercovitz on Twitter blunders small businesses make (). She’s come up with 10. I’m going for the five that seem most important to me, though they’re all great.

• Shameless self-promotion ‒ What?!! That’s an article of faith in American society. Still, hold back a bit.

• Retweeting yourself ‒ No, it’s not efficient. It’s lazy. If you want to tweet about the same content, find another way to say it.

• Using multiple hashtags in a tweet ‒ They make your tweet annoyingly unreadable.

• Tweets that are too long ‒ Huh? Tweets are short by definition. But leave enough characters to allow people to add commentary, @mentions, etc. when retweeting you.

• Irregularity ‒ Tweet every day.

Ms. Bercovitz is not a big fan of robo-tweeting and recommends moderation—believing that followers want to see the real person behind the tweets. I get that, but it’s my way of dealing with a busy schedule and still trying to participate.  I’m a big fan of Hootsuite, which makes it possible to queue up tweets promoting my blog and other interesting content and spread them out over a few days. And, the Ragan feed has some great stuff about writing, editing, and PR. So, I plan to continue. There’s enough “human” stuff from me to balance out.

What you do you think?

In the same spirit, I propose that you check out “Clueless users: 10 more tales of the absurd” by Brien Posey. This piece is absolutely worth reading in its entirety. Each petite vignette is a gem, but I’m particularly fond of this one:

7: Bad power strip

I once got a call from a user who said that he thought that either a circuit breaker had been tripped or his power strip had gone bad because neither his computer nor his monitor were receiving any power. This guy was normally pretty sharp, so I assumed that his diagnosis was probably correct.

When I showed up with a new power strip, I began unplugging everything from the old power strip only to discover that the power strip was plugged into itself rather than being plugged into an electrical outlet.

More Madness

Mr. Posey has also written “10 stupid user stories: The madness persists.” Full of guaranteed howlers.

Enjoy.

These brand names are freely and generically used—often by their owners, who should know better. They are verbified and sometimes associated with negatives. Remember political commentators referring to Ronald Reagan as the “Teflon” president, because bad stuff just didn’t seem to stick to him?

Avoiding Genericide

You should avoid genericide like the plague. I used to work in sales for Dictaphone—now a division of Nuance Communications, and that company was famous for taking brand misusers to court in a heartbeat. And I once knew a woman who ran Casini’s, a specialty apparel shop in D.C. Not surprisingly, she received a classic cease-and-desist letter from designer Oleg Cassini’s attorneys, who claimed that she was diluting and therefore damaging his brand.

So, how do you prevent genericide? In my opinion, Ms. Richardson’s two most important tips are 1) never use your brand name generically and 2) follow your brand name with a description of it what it is or does. One thing is for sure, though, you need to be consistent and diligent guarding your brand name use or the courts won’t rule in your favor.

Have you ever worked for a company that had problems protecting its brand? What was its response? And, what examples of brand genericide can you come up with?

Esteemed colleague Robbie Kellman Baxter recently posted about the need for marketing executives to stay current with technology. She introduced her post with a vignette about a friend’s mother who sported a beehive, mini-dress, and kitten heels when the rest of the world had moved on to bell bottoms and shags. This lady stuck to her definition of the classics and turned into a relic.

Most of my readers, I suspect, are not marketing executives, yet we all need to understand the impact technology has on our lives. The example I provide is a bit closer to home than strange-looking hairdos and couture that’s unwearable for those of us over 40.

Behind the times

A few days ago, the phone rang, and I picked it up out of pure curiosity. (Hey, talking on the phone already sounds pretty low tech, but bear with me.) On the other end was a massage therapist I had seen years ago. He was personally contacting former clients—which earns my respect—to let them know about his new promotional pricing. Being on the busy side, I said, “Hey, great. Let me check that out on your website.” Long silence. “Well,” he said, with a note of pride, “I’m kinda old fashioned. I don’t have one.”

Dragging yourself into the present

Argh. Just about every small business owner I know has a website. I’m not talking about anything radical here. Just a simple site with a home page, an “about us” page, some work samples if they apply, and maybe pricing. A blog would be good, too. Yes, it costs money to find a decent designer and—I hope—a good copywriter, but you gotta spend money to make money. Or maybe you want to do a Facebook page instead. The point here is to make judicious use of the technology available to you so that you’re not stumping along in your kitten heels when everyone else is in Nikes.

(By the way, I love kitten heels!)

Anyway, I was getting ready to write when I was ambushed by a section in a style guide from one of my favorite clients. This little gem, nestled at the bottom of a page, leapt out at me, and I quote it in its entirety.

Follow these critical writing tips, courtesy of George Orwell:

•  Never use a long word where a short one will do.

• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

• Never use the passive where you can use the active.

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

In just a few words, Mr. Orwell has argued effectively against pomposity, long-windedness, awkwardness, and pretense. What more could a budding or an experienced writer want as a guide?

More about the wonderfulness of style guides at some point too.

So I read a post from Matt Lawrence of Biznik entitled “You’re killing me with that unsubscribe email confirmation” with interest.

Heaven knows, I’ve unsubscribed from a lot of newsletters. And for the reasons Mr. Lawrence cites. I was interested in a topic at one time but am not now. I’m no longer working on a project that required the information provided by the newsletter. Or I decided to try to deal with email overwhelm.

Mr. Lawrence’s article is short and worth reading.  In my opinion, the biggest takeaway is this: Content provided is a service. And we “have an opportunity as service providers to continue that service all the way up to the very end of the experience, even when that action is an unsubscribe from our newsletter.” If we can “delight” our readers—a term that I find slightly annoying, by the way—then they may come back or recommend us to others.

Mr. Lawrence would increase the chance of delight by customizing the canned response to an unsubscribe acknowledgment. He might treat readers as something other than “leads” or “subscribers” by using language that aligns with his brand.  In his words, you need to do “something to make the email valuable, and worth their time – remember that you are still communicating with them!”

What would you do?