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Aligned Marketing Blog

Marketing executive, Steve Hartkopf shares all in this informative yet personable blog.

Why is Copywriting so Important?

Steve Hartkopf - Monday, April 19, 2010
Copywriting refers to a particular type of writing. Copywriting is writing that sells, delivers a call-to-action in a compelling way, and influences you to think and do things that, without it, you might not do.

Good copywriting is a combination of talent and technique. Traditionally copywriting was a mysterious craft locked deep within ad agencies. The web, as it has a way of doing, has changed that. Now everyone who sends an email, posts a blog, creates their own website, or promotes their business through social media is a copywriter. Some of us are good copywriters but most of us are not.

Blasting out “buy me” messages is not good copywriting or good marketing, it's spamming. It’s an immature approach and reminds me of a teenager’s approach to music – the louder the better. Turning up the volume doesn’t make bad music better; it makes it worse. People buy things to improve their life, not because you’ve beaten them into submission.

In our hurry-up, get-it-done yesterday, world only the best copy gets attention and results. Explaining what is involved in the best copywriting would require a book but here are three things to keep in mind the next time you have to do some copywriting:

  1. You need to clearly understand your product and your goal. How does what you are selling improve your target audience’s life? And, what is it, specifically, that you want your audience to do? Think about this as though you are a business: (A) What is it that you are offering that is superior and distinctive from the competition? (B) What are your audiences “hot-buttons?” Connect A and B. You will receive “A” (the benefit) if you do “B” (the action).
  2. You need to have some writing skills. This probably seems like a no-brainer but it’s amazing how many people send out emails, for example, that are poorly written. Pedestrian emails that are not only stale and unoriginal but are also unclear and irrelevant won’t get the job done. Copy that doesn’t relate and doesn’t make sense to the target audience falls flat and can even irritate those you are trying to win to your cause. The examples are endless but (here’s one) how many websites have you visited and read where there is no clear idea of what’s in it for you?
  3. You need to be creative. I know your boss just wants the facts. He wants you to get to the point. That’s a good approach when you need to plow through a ton of work but if you need to change behavior, then sprinkle some creativity dust on your copy. Just don’t go wild. There’s a big difference between copy that titillates, but is basically pointless, and copy that motivates and produces action.

If all that sounds too hard, then maybe you need to hire a professional?

Steve

800-707-9150

Name It and Claim It

Steve Hartkopf - Wednesday, March 17, 2010
I’m not convinced there are any social media experts; it’s all so new. In my opinion we’re all pioneers. We poke and prod, experiment, slash through the brush and, in the end, if we’ve been thoughtful and diligent, we find our own new world.

An often-overlooked step in the process is the first one, which is the easiest one: Claim your brand name on every platform. Open at least one account on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., under your company name and brand names. Claim your online real estate before someone else does. That’s really important so I’ll wait…there’s a very reason I made you do that.

The reason is squatters. Squatters will steal your brand names and either block you from your own names or, worse, begin posting as you and potentially do significant damage to your brand. So claim your space now and thank me later.

Most of the platforms have specific rules about squatting and many will help you reclaim your rightful names, but not all. To some it’s just a platform and whatever happens, well, happens. There are numerous examples of names being claimed and even abused. Look at this screenshot from Twitter carefully:

Pfizer’s real Twitter account is @pfizer_news. The guy, I won’t name him because I don’t want to help him and I don’t support this kind of pirating, has the Pfizer name. He doesn’t appear to be malicious but neither is he flattering. Don’t you want your online representation to be flattering? If you’re Pfizer don’t you want to control your own name?

If someone is only casually paying attention, which happens a lot on Twitter, wouldn’t it be easy for them to think this was Pfizer’s official account?

Here’s a shortcut to claiming your name. There are services, such as KnowEm, that you can pay to secure your name on hundreds of social media sites. It’s a good way to secure your name even on platforms you have no intention of using without having to do all the grunt-work yourself.

Finally, after you’ve secured your name go to each one and complete your profile. I know it’s a pain but the search engines are now indexing the social media platforms so this is a quick and easy way to support your brand and increase traffic to your (official) website.

It really boils down to two choices, you claim it or someone else will. So what’s it gonna be?

Steve

800-707-9150

Is this Any Way to Run a Country?

Steve Hartkopf - Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I'm not going to right directly about business, communication, social media or any of that today. Instead I'm going to write about what everyone seems to be talking about, ObamaCare.


Everywhere I go it seems people are talking about ObamaCare. Most of the people I talk to (older white guys like me) see it as a government takeover of healthcare, the old "16% of the economy" statement. They believe such a step is highly intrusive on our personal freedom and too expensive, a huge risk. Most add that if you want healthcare then you need to get a job. Government you see can't fix anything, it's inefficient as heck (think DMV) and, oh by the way, if they wanted to fix healthcare they should start by fixing Medicare and Medicaid, both of which are basically bankrupt. The enemies are the trial lawyers, who drive up malpractice insurance through frivolous claims and record awards, and tax-and-spend liberals who never saw a government program they didn't like because so few of them actually pay for them.

A second group, which is generally led by my more liberal Democratic friends, believe it is a great idea. Healthcare is something everyone needs, is basically a human right, and since the uninsured end up in Emergency Rooms anyway, the highest cost healthcare service available, which, by the way, only treats symptoms, any solution is less expensive than the current system. The problem with the current system is it's a patchwork of rules and laws created by our true enemies - a corrupt system ran lobbyist, insurance companies and heartless Republicans who only care about the most capable and the most blessed amongst us. If the government could just manage the whole thing it would work for everyone.

The truth from my perspective is both Democratics and Republicans are corrupt. They're both for sale, they both lie and, for the most part, are only interested in power, re-election and themselves. There are no statesmen taking the high ground in this debate.  It's partisan. Manipulating the people is more a means to an end. My view is a little cynical but then i did graduate at the top of my class.

In the end I think the Democrats will get their way and we'll have national healthcare. At some point we're going to realize we can't afford our entitlement programs and our large military. So, like France and Japan and many other countries, we'll cut back on our military spending. We will survive and still be great, we'll just won't be the same. Is that good or bad? I

'm not sure. I think we are a little too aggressive militarily but if we're not there to stop the bad-guys who will?

One possibility is the country is so enraged by this "take-over" that they will throw the Democratics (yes, it's actually the Democratic Party) out in November. A wave of Republicans will arrive, slow down this process, that will give business more confidence to hire and invest, and the economy will pick up more steam.

Before you stand up and cheer, realize that this apparent good news does not solve the healthcare issue and the Republicans, as we've seen in the past, are fully capable of the same level or stupidity. Is this any way to run a country?

Steve
800-707-9150

Are You a Spammer?

Steve Hartkopf - Monday, March 08, 2010
I’m often asked how businesses can use social media. In separate conversations, the National Electrical Supply Association (NAED) and the Industrial Supply Association (ISA), think GE and 3M, respectively, are asking that very question. Collectively the two organizations represent approximately  $300B of our economy. Neither has an answer to the question, so I gave their representatives a glimpse of mine.

Social media is really nothing more than an online reflection of the offline world. The offline process that leads up to a sale; "know me, like me, trust me," also applies to the online world of social media. Sales happen at the end of that process in both worlds.

That sounds simple because it is. What’s striking is how many people get it terribly wrong. Instead of taking the time to get involved in an online community, much as any good business person would if they joined the local Chamber of Commerce, most people rush to the Close. They broadcast their sales pitch out randomly, hoping to hit a target. What a total waste of energy, not to mention the damage done to your brand.

When they don’t hit a target, they blame the medium, the technology. “I tried social media and it didn‘t work.” That’s a crock but it is easier than blaming themselves. It’s easier than doing the hard work involved and dedicating the time to do truly join a community and contribute real value. It’s easier than being a responsible citizen.

Responsibilities are serious business. Avoiding your responsibilities to build trust in the community, which is that you are doing if you just throw out your pitch randomly, means you are a spammer. Spammer is an ugly word in our wired-up world. So ugly that in it’s most literal sense, it’s illegal. Most of us have software installed on our computers to block these cretins.

Opening accounts on social sites such as LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and the others for the single purpose of promoting yourself is a bad strategy. Get involved! Become an active member of the community. Provide value. Give good advice and engage with a servant’s heart. Keep the conversation going on the forum itself, don’t try to divert members to your site, your self-interest. Wait until you’re asked.

Take the time to comment and vote on other people’s content. Visit other people’s blogs and “RT” (retweet) good information, Friend those you know or who have similar interests as you and call-out the spammers. Finally, rather than quantity you should seek quality.

In other words focus your efforts on the social sites you are going to be involved in and sites that contain a group of people who can relate to your content and perspective. Don’t submit an article on postpartum depression to a social network convened around Fantasy Football.

As is always the case, to reap the rewards you must do the work. Everyone, as I taught my two boys, pays List Price for success.

Add value to the community and the community will reciprocate.

Steve

800-707-9150

Tying Social Media to Business Results

Steve Hartkopf - Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Tying Social Media to Business Results

Does your company have specific business goals for your social media activities? If not, you should.

In a November 2009 survey MarketingSherpa discovered that approximately ninety-four percent (see chart below) of those surveyed use social media to increase their website traffic, which is not surprising.

What might surprise you is twenty-one percent don’t actually measure their results and five percent have no specific objectives for their social media activities. So I can only assume that they’re on LinkedIn and Tweeting, for example, because they think it’s the right thing to do.

Doing something for the sake of doing it doesn’t sound like real business to me, does it to you?

The other thing that surprised me was the relatively low number of respondents who use social media to reduce their customer acquisition and customer support costs. I mean, the tools are free!

The bottom line is social media is a free and easy to use platform for promoting your business and communicating directly with your customers and prospect, so use it.

If you’re not sure how, give us a call.

Steve Hartkopf

800-707-9150

Finding Niche Markets & Hot Topics

Steve Hartkopf - Monday, February 08, 2010
If you’re looking for niche markets, hot topics and new ideas there are a bunch of sites that can help you beyond the search engines although, in some cases, they are sub-domains of the search engines.

I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. Since I’m usually targeting the US market, I’ll click on “U.S. Zeitgeist,” otherwise I’ll look at “Zeitgeist Around the World.”


Lycos Top 50 and Yahoo! Buzz are two other sites, like Google Zeitgeist, that I review when I’m looking for the latest trends in digital products and hot topics.


The eBay Pulse site is also an excellent place to start looking at niche markets and topics and is one very few people, from what I can tell, use for research.


If you still can’t find anything to get your creative marketing or writing juices flowing then here are some other sites to investigate:

Nichebot - http://www.nichebot.com

Shopping.com Searches – http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches

AOL Hot Searches - http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot

Google Groups - http://groups.google.com

Craig's List - http://www.craigslist.com

Delicious Popular - http://del.icio.us/popular

Digg - http://www.digg.com

Google Catalogs - http://catalogs.google.com

Google Suggest – http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Technorati - http://www.technorati.com

If you want to focus exclusively on what’s selling visit the Clickbank Marketplace (http://marketplace.clickbank.net).

The web is constantly changing so it requires effort to stay current, to remain relevant.

As a marketing consultant it’s my business to stay abreast of web-trends. Feel free to call me if you’re having trouble finding the information you need.

Steve Hartkopf

800-707-9150

 

Small Business meets Big Technology

Steve Hartkopf - Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Small business owners face big challenges everyday. One of the tougher issues is balancing the need for technology with available cash. There’s seldom enough cash for the technology I need or want but it’s hard to be more productive without more technology. What to do?

Here are three tools that can help you win new customers and none of them cost a lot of money. In fact, most of them are free, excluding the cost of your Internet connection.

First, think about having a free personal hard drive on the Internet that is not only huge but comes with free software that mimics Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs. That’s Google Docs.


Google Docs can be used for word processing, creating spreadsheets or producing great presentations. Better yet, you can share your files with anyone (everyone) with an Internet connection and, if you want, give them editing rights. No more email attachments going back-and-forth and wasted time trying to figure out which is the latest file. If you work with people outside your office or just like the idea of good software being free, then Google Docs is a must-have tool. Did I mention it’s free?

Another great free tool is social media. I know, what’s social media? Well, it’s Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and a hundred other strange-sounding online communities. Just like the real world there’s a lot of nonsense on these sites, but there’s also a lot of really good people. I’ve gotten new ideas, computer support, made new friends and gained new clients from these online communities. If you think social media is just for kids, your wrong. Again, it’s like the real world, you talk to the people you want to talk to and avoid those you don’t.

The third one will cost you. Skype is an online phone service that allows you to call anyone in the U.S., conduct conference calls, and even video calls for, are you ready, $30.00 a year. There are some minor restrictions and they have plans that cost more. But, being able to conduct video calls for $30.00 a year is tremendous value and having video conferencing capabilities really lets small business owners project a much larger image.

Want proof? I used these tools to connect with a company in Chicago that led to a $1.5 billion company in New York and ended up doing business with both of them.

You don’t have to be a technical wiz-kid to use these tools. I use them all the time; you can too. If you have any questions or want to learn more, call me at 803-810-3180.

Steve

Social Media, the Video

Steve Hartkopf - Monday, February 01, 2010
A lot of people still wonder about social media. What is it? Is it here to stay? I gave you my thoughts on why it's here to stay in last week's blog - Cro-Magnon Invented Social Media.

You may disagree with me. That's fine.

The video below explains social media in a different way, probably a more interesting way. It's been seen by more than 1,300,000 people. Have you ever done anything that been seen by more than a million people?



In case you want your message exposed to millions of people, Aligned Marketing does social media and video.

Steve
803-810-3180
800-707-9150

Can Apple Help Your Business?

Steve Hartkopf - Wednesday, January 20, 2010
It’s something to think about.

Apple’s iPhone and Apps Store are monster hits. Apple may sell 40-45 million iPhones in 2010 and that’s on top of the current 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch already sold worldwide. These products are useful and very cool. Part of their success is driven by the iTunes App Store.

Apple says there are 125,000 developers in their Developer Program and over 85,000 Apps available for downloading. In mid-2009 Apple announced that the App Store had reached 1 billion app downloads…four months later (September, 2009) that number crossed the 2 billion mark. Wow.


Want to be part of the action?

Before I tell you how, I need to ask you for a favor: Please go to the iTunes Store and either click here or type in “Aligned Marketing.” I’ll wait. Do you see my picture? Okay, now download the App. The next time you sync your iPhone a new icon (the Aligned Marketing target in our logo) will be added to your iPhone screen.

Press the icon anytime and you’ll have immediate access to all my latest blogs, Tweets and videos on the Aligned Marketing YouTube Channel. Each one is configured for viewing on your iPhone. Yes, we’ve gone mobile.

It’s a great way to read a blog when you’re not in front of your computer. I wish more people would do this. If you’re interested in getting your own free iPhone App, here’s how.

Visit www.MotherApp.com and click on the link in the center of the page just under “MotherApp BlogEngine.” Here is what you should see:
 
MotherApp’s BlogEngine is the amazing tool that converts your blog and tweets into a native iPhone app in minutes with zero coding.

Simply enter your RSS feed URL, Twitter name and a description of your blog, then upload two images and voilà – you’ve created your very own iPhone app!

MotherApp takes care of submitting the app to Apple for approval and notifies you when it’s available for download.

It’s that easy!

It wasn’t quite that easy. There were some minor communication issues during the process and it took more than the promised two weeks to deliver. But so what? It’s hard to complain when you get something this cool for FREE.

I don’t yet know if this is going to help my business or not. But how much would you pay if someone said, I can expose your business, your website, YouTube Channel, Twitter account and blog, to potentially 50-100 million people?

Okay, now send me that money.

Steve

P.S. Let me know if you need any help.

The Yin and Yang of Email

Steve Hartkopf - Wednesday, January 13, 2010
In Chinese philosophy there’s a concept called yin yang, which was later westernized into yin and yang. Yin and yang is used to describe disjointed or opposing forces that are in fact connected and interdependent, one, in turn, gives rise to the other. Loosely applying this concept to a relatively new phenomenon, email, I came up with the following ways to improve your productivity.


The yin: Increase your email effectiveness:

  1. Use the subject as a Headline. In a few words tell your reader what the email is about and the reason they should open it.
  2. Keep your email content clear and concise. Strive for brevity because the shorter-the-better rule applies. Emails that begin with, “We were talking at lunch…” are deleted immediately, so get to the point.  
  3. If the issues can’t be addressed in a few sentences then it’s a phone call and not an email.
  4. Proofread your email for clarity and grammar before sending. For example, check your pronoun agreement: Using “he,’ “she,” and “they” (etc.) is fine as long as it’s crystal clear who you are referring to and both the gender and the number (singular or plural) are in agreement. Yes, this is one of my pet-peeves.
  5. Marking your email as “urgent” doesn’t mean it’ll be opened and read immediately. In fact, if you click the urgent button frequently you’ll be labeled a spammer or worse, a drama-queen, and find that your emails are being deleted unopened.
  6. Avoid jargon, acronyms, especially those popularized by the web like LOL (laugh out loud) and OMG (Oh my God!), unless you are emailing a close friend and/or that communication style is appropriate for the message.

The yang: Reduce your email activity:

  1. The surest way to reduce your inbound emails is to reduce your outbound emails. I set a goal to reduce my outbound emails by 25% once and, even though I didn’t keep precise records, having that “goal” reduced my output significantly, which led (I'm convinced) to significantly fewer inbound emails.
  2. Create a “four-, five- or six-week” folder and dump all your unimportant or non-critical, in other words all those CYA (cover-your-arse) emails, into that folder. Then set up your email system to automatically delete those emails after the prescribed time.
  3. Similarly, create a “Review later” folder and deposit all the emails you want to review later into that folder. I drop a lot of newsletters and marketing materials into my “Later” folder and review them while watching television. Setting them up for auto-delete is optional.
  4. Schedule email time. Let everyone know you “do email” for one hour in the morning and then catch up after 5:00. The message you’re sending is don’t call at 2:30 and say, “I just sent you an email, what do you think?” This is extreme but it seems to be a big productivity booster.
  5. Similarly, turn the email notification setting on your mobile device off during meetings. All the buzzing and vibrating is annoying and only adds to your (and everyone’s stress). Trust me, you’ll have plenty of emails to play with when you get back to your office. And don't even ask about sending emails while in the meeting...please.
  6. Reserve the use of Reply-to-All to rare occasions and then, use it only if everyone in the thread works for you or you are instructed to reply-to-all (by a higher-up). This, grrrr, arrrr…is also a real bugga-boo for me.
I bet there's a bunch of email productivity tactics I missed. What are some of yours?

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