SEEING A BIG CORPORATE PR EVENT IN ACTION

Yesterday, I attended an open house at my husband's workplace. He works for Dow AgriSciences at the Davenport, Iowa, station. Officially, they had the open house to celebrate completing their new office construction project. Part of the celebration was to give a $10,000 donation to Habitat for Humanity. Now, please don't think I'm cynical or pessimistic, because I fully believe that one can simultaneously be giving, altruistic, and charitable while also serving their own business interests. So, yes this was a celebration and a good deed to the community, but it was also a public relations event.

The event had a good turnout - over 50 attended including one of the television news stations. And I speculated why that was so; here's what I came up with:

• Free food - a delicious lunch catered from a local restaurant, including dessert (peach cobbler - Yum!)
• Personal Invitations - several stakeholders in the company and community were personally invited and they were each invited to invite an additional guest
• Pre-printed name tags - they made it feel official and that you were truly an invited guest
• Promotional Swag - booklets and pamphlets about products plus pencils and notepads (which are pictured and I had to text my husband to grab me some because I forgot to do it)
• Charitable Donation - the above-mentioned check to Habitat, a large check was presented and pictures were taken

It was a nice event and, luckily for my husband and his colleagues (and probably the attendees), it was planned and attended by three employees from the corporate office who I assume were from the marketing (or at least a related) department. So, what's the lesson small businesses, particularly small service businesses, can take away from this big, corporate event?

First, if you're kind of an in-the-background company (my husband's company develops seed corn for farmers, not exactly something "out there" in the world too blatantly), you might need to get creative to find something to celebrate. My husband's work happened to have built a new building for the sole purpose of advancing the business - but it did create jobs for local construction professionals, has the potential to create new jobs for the company itself, and it added to the local economy - something valuable and worth celebrating. So, if you have a new development in your company, don't be afraid to brag about it a little. Even if you don't hold a party, you can send a press release and see if the media will cover it.

The second lesson is to partner. In essence, Dow AgriSciences partnered with Habitat for Humanity for the event by donating a check. But, it wasn't just a random donation - Habitat for Humanity is an organization which the employees (corporate and local) value and support so they could combine this genuine desire to help a worthy organization with having another organization help promote the event and give another reason for the media to cover it. So, if you have an organization or cause about which you feel strongly and want to help, do it under your business persona and let people know (again, it doesn't have to be an event but simply a press release or announcements on social media).

As a small business, you can learn from corporate America - it just takes some creativity. And if you are genuine and authentic in everything you do, you don't have to worry about feeling guilty because it helps your bottom line as well.

Happy Celebrating!
-the Wordsy Woman

RECONSIDER OUTSOURCING IF YOU'RE A SERVICE BUSINESS

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/44313045@N08/6290270129/

As a service business owner, especially a solo, micro, or small service business owner, you are busy. Swamped. You barely have enough time to perform your service, let alone do your own clerical tasks and marketing. So you hire someone to do it for you. Outsourcing work that drains you or is a weakness for you is a great idea in almost every aspect of your business, except for at least one: writing your social media posts.

There are so many different ways for small service businesses to get involved in social media, it can be overwhelming. You may find yourself thinking that there is no way on this Earth you could possibly have enough time to do all of this social media marketing adequately. And you'd be right. So don't. Don't try to be active on every social media platform. Instead, pick a few on which to focus. If you're totally new to social media for your business, pick one to start with, get really good at it, and then add another outlet.

You may be tempted to outsource your social media marketing; although it might be a good idea to get some help with your planning and strategizing for social media, I believe it is not a good idea to outsource the actual posting or writing. If you are a service business, your business is essentially all you. To attract, gain, and keep clients, you need to build a relationship with them through trust and mutual connections. To do this, you need to be genuine and authentic; i.e. you need to be yourself. If someone else is posting on your social media outlets for you, you are not being yourself, so any trust or connection you build will be false. Besides, how embarrassing would it be to have someone comment on something you posted when they see you in person, but you have no idea what they're talking about?

Outsource your taxes, your bookkeeping, your office cleaning, and even your website building, but try to avoid outsourcing writing your social media posts. It's better to be small and authentic in social media than to be prolific but fake.

Happy Socializing!
-The Wordsy Woman

USING A CREATIVE WRITING FRAMEWORK TO DRAFT WRITTEN MARKETING MATERIALS

When leading creative writing workshops, I usually show the participants this graphic toward the beginning of class. It depicts my personal view of the creative writing process. This process can be applied to any type of writing, not just poetry, novels, and creative non-fiction. Let's say you have a marketing piece to write but you don't know where to start.

First, do some free writing. Get out a notebook and pen (or computer if that better suits you) and write down everything that pops into your head about what you want to say. Describe the ideal person who will read the piece. Where are they when they read it? What do you want them to think as they read it? Feel? What do you want them to do after they read it? Brainstorm as many ways as you can think of to convey the idea or message. Don't worry about grammar, punctuation, or even if it's written well. Just get everything in your head down on the paper or up on the computer screen.

As you write and re-read what you've written, you will start to formulate ideas. Do some additional free writing focused on these ideas about what form the writing should take (blog post, ad, article, etc.) and more specifically how to say it. As you can see from the diagram, this is a cyclic process. Writing leads to ideas which leads to more writing which leads to more ideas, etc. until you're ready to catapult down the line into the revision phase.

Think of the revision phase as the overall crafting of your piece. Put it in the form on which you've decided. Move things around, fix sentences, add in graphics, etc. You can also picture a cyclic arrow within this phase as you keep revising until it is almost just right. If you're working with a team or have someone you can share it with, go ahead and do it at this phase. You don't want to have them read it at the very end only to hear some great over-arching ideas for change.

Next is the editing phase. This is where you look at the piece on a sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word level to make sure there are no typos or errors. During this phase, you will want to read the piece out loud, at a minimum, or, if you can, have one or several people read it over for you to point out any errors you've missed.

Finally, is sharing. Post the blog. Run the ad. Publish the article, etc. And, like with creative writing, get started free writing for your next piece.

Want to learn another creative writing technique to help you connect with your target market (especially a service-based market)? Then click here to subscribe to my enewsletter and get my free report.

-The Wordsy Woman

USING CREATIVE WRITING IN MARKETING

As I've studied marketing on my own and while getting my MBA, I've been kind of amazed at how much crossover there is between writing things designed to try to sell a product or service and writing novels and poetry. I've taken many lessons from creative writing and applied them to writing for marketing purposes. Some of them include:

• Using all 5 senses to tell a compelling story
• Saying things succinctly
• Using fewer words for greater impact
• Defining a character (or target reader)
• Creating things with a beginning, a middle, and an end
• Using a leading hook to grab attention
• Increasing pace with short sentences
• Considering your audience or reader

These are just the few I could brainstorm at the moment. I'm sure there are more I haven't remembered - and some I haven't realized yet.

If you want to learn more about one of them - Using Creative Writing Techniques to Connect with Your Target Market - I have a free report and mini workbook available in exchange for signing up for my e-newsletter. Just click here to go my Business Words Enewsletter page and enter your email to subscribe. After that you'll get an email from my newsletter distribution service asking you to confirm your subscription; you'll receive the link to the report within an hour of getting the subscription confirmation email.

If you want to look at past issues or learn more, that information is on the Business Words Enewsletter page, too.

Happy Writing!
-The Wordsy Woman

A MARKETING LESSON FROM "THE WALTONS"

I am known to watch several episodes of The Waltons on Sunday afternoons when the show takes its turn in INSP network's Sunday marathon rotation. I wasn't really old enough to watch it when it aired weekly and I'm not sure I would've been interested had I been. But, now, I enjoy watching and reading about times of long ago and with John Boy being a writer, I can relate to his character.

But the last time I watched, I also got a lesson in marketing. Elizabeth and her friend set up a lemonade stand outside of Godsey's General Store. They offered pink lemonade and regular, yellow lemonade for the same price: 5 cents per glass. But neither sold well.

Then Grandpa Zeb had an idea. He lowered the price of the pink lemonade and deemed it only for women and children. He then added a bit of the "recipe" to the yellow lemonade. He also set about letting people know about the special lemonade for men. Of course, after that, the kids could barely keep up with production; the yellow lemonade drained out almost as fast as they could pour it.

This is a great demonstration of how things need to work together in marketing to make a product successful. It sometimes takes some experimenting and tweaking. In this case, it was the product that needed the most revision. Once that was done and a few people learned about the delicious yellow lemonade, word spread and sales took off.

It's amazing what you can learn (or reinforce what you've already learned) just by watching old time TV on Sunday afternoons...

May all your lemons be made into special-"recipe" spiked lemonade!

-The Wordsy Woman

PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR SHOES

If you are a small business owner or small proprietor or freelancer trying to decide what words you should use to promote or market your business, change your shoes. Rather than being the service or product provider, put yourself in the role of customer. Visit an independent bookstore, buy a cake from a local bakery, hire a contractor, or find a real job or product you need which you may normally take care of on your own but hire it done or buy it somewhere else. And then use what you learn in your promotion and marketing.

In addition to the obvious of paying attention to how your competitor actually performs the work or to the quality and price of his or her product, concentrate on the whole process. How were you treated? How did you feel? What bugged you about the process? Was there not enough communication or too much? What made you a little nervous? What were your biggest concerns – that it be done on time, that the price was right, or that the quality was good enough? Would you have liked more personal advice or connection? What satisfied you? What could have been done better?

Use your observations and answers to these questions to amp up your competitive advantage. Can you incorporate any positive aspects of the experience into your own way of doing business? Avoid repeating the negative aspects of the experience in your own business dealings. For example, did you wish you would’ve received more status updates on work progress? If so, make sure you are providing adequate updates to your customers. If you’re not sure how many updates your customers want, ask them. After all, meeting customer needs is one of the objectives of doing business under the goal umbrella of making a profit.

Want more Wordsy Woman tips about marketing, click here and request my free publication, 10 Tips for Reaching Today's Consumers.