Tomicide Solutions, September 2018

How Cheap Junk Collateral Copy Can Tank Your Brand And Bottom Line

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Growing up in the communist school system, from grade 5 on, it was mandatory for us to learn Russian.

Since I didn't go to college (my school barred my whole class from applying to maintain the perfect 100% higher education acceptance rate. No one applied divided by no one accepted => 100% success rate), only 8 years of Russian torture was waiting for me.

Initially I made an effort, but when I realised that my Russian grades didn't count to my final results, especially in high school, I stopped taking it seriously.

But I still had to pass.

So, I was looking for a shortcut.

I soon found it.

It turned out that if I could sing, or at least cite, the Soviet national anthem both in Russian and Hungarian by heart, I could pass my Russian classes.

So, I changed my tactic and focused on rote anthem-memorisation.

And it helped. I passed my Russian classes and finished high school.

And, sadly, this is exactly...

How Most IT Service Firm Leaders Treat Copy Today

They regard copy as a trivial element of their marketing efforts to merely fill the spaces between cute images of technical bits and bobs and some random people.

But do you know that your overall marketing success is about 10% of your sales copy?

I know it doesn't seem to be much but still.

What is the other 90%?

Well, your overall sales and marketing success, that is, overall business success is all about...

Direct Response Success Contributors

Can you see any graphics art, web design or SEO on the list?

Neither can I?

Yet, many IT service SMBs spend the king's ransom on web designers, graphics artists and SEO people and then end up hiring the cheapest copywriters they can find.

After all, it's all about filling those ugly empty spaces with some semi-intelligent words.

They put minor effort and resources behind something that could create a major impact in their businesses.

And that reminds me of...

Why Cheap Copy Doesn't Do It Any Longer

Once upon a time, marketers operated on the notion that the more people they could contact, the more sales they could make.

And while that approach was good for the past, today it's about as useful as nipples on a breastplate.

Modern day's customers don't pay much attention simply because marketers demand so much of it.

Both online and offline spaces are full of annoying, low-grade marketing messages, like...

...that do more harm than good for sellers.

Today's buyers don't pay attention because there are more marketers to catch their attention but the marketing messages are often so bad.

Yes, the market is full of noise, and buyers try to insulate themselves from the whole commotion.

The problem is that many of today's marketers use the wrong kind of resources. They spend a fortune to subscribe to a boatload of apps and online tools to monitor their marketing, but ignore that basic tools that are needed to create the kind of performance numbers that are worth monitoring.

It's like the people who want to lose weight and buy the best scales and phone apps to track their progress, but "forget" to see personal trainers who could design weight loss programmes for them.

That's why while in the past, mass marketing worked fine, but today, marketers need to segment their target markets.

Segmentation can be done in many ways, but the best way I see is segmenting by problems.

And this is where good copy could come into the equation but it often doesn't.

Many IT service firm leaders erroneously believe copy is just some filler on an impressive-looking website, brochure or PowerPoint presentation.

In the Seven Strategies Of Health, Wealth And Happiness, author Jim Rohn wrote that we shouldn't put major time, effort and resources behind minor initiatives that can result only in pittance of improvements.

Case in point.

Most IT companies want to increase their sales but very few pay attention to their pricing. But 1% price increase can add as much as 11.7% to the company profits. By contrast, 1% revenue increase can add only 3.2%.

And as your sales force gets bigger, your sales per salesperson nosedives, while your cost of sales skyrockets.

In Principle-Centred Leadership, Steven Covey wrote that a breakthrough usually comes from a "break-with". To break through a plateau or to reach new heights of success, we must break with our current methodologies.

In the 70s and 80s, it was fine to run legion-sized sales forces. Today, it's pointless because buyers refuse to meet salespeople until they are some 57-73% "deep" in the buying cycle.

And what happens after that point is the function of the perception buyers' have developed about your company through your written communication.

That's why no one haggles in the Apple Store, but Best Buy is full of price shoppers and bargain hunters.

Using agricultural lingo, your copy plants the seeds (initiates contact) and tills the soil (nurtures relationships), preparing it for a bountiful harvest.

Peasants all over the world, most of them without Ivy League MBAs, know this little detail.

Many IT firm leaders simply ignore it and try to harvest without ever planting and cultivating the soil.

They put out literary excrement like...

"Content Proz is well known site. It is best writing site. It has cheap content writer. The writers are highly skilled on our site. Our experts will solve all your biz issues. You just need to get cheap aid of our writers.

Our writers give out class work. They write top class content for the sites. Our content is always unique since we write from scratch. You will find our work ideal in all means."

And time and again, they come up with meagre harvest of low grade clients with labour-intensive but underfunded projects.

And it's all because they compromise on one of the most important elements of their revenue-generation, their sales copy.

So, realistically, everything is copy.

And since it's your written materials that make the first impression of your business...

Bad Copy...

  1. Positions your firm as just another undifferentiated tech vendor with "me too" type commoditised tech services that can be bought by the pound like sacks of potatoes. Every sale is the same drudgery: Canned dog-and-pony show sales presentations to impress apathetic, price-obsessed procurement agents. Then spend weeks to respond to RFPs with very low win rate.

  2. Presents your firms as a "we do any IT for anyone" type generalist business. The problem is that generalists have the toughest competition.

  3. Forces you to follow your buyers' buying criteria. You are forced to march through the sales cycle to the bet of their drums.

  4. Undermines the trust you've already built. Selling IT services is a trust-based business. It requires huge level of trust on your clients' parts to let you fiddle with their IT infrastructure. And technical competence, or even excellence, is not enough to earn trust. There is a tad more to it. But bad copy fails to communicate that.

  5. Opens the door to seemingly endless price objections.

  6. Fails to tell your story in an engaging and intriguing manner. Apple repeatedly tells the "Apple story" about how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976 in the Jobs family's garage.

  7. Undermines the response to your communication. When you meet buyers, having read your written materials which have ill-positioned your business, they treat as a fungible vendor who can be replaced at the drop of a hat.

  8. Forces you to run a bigger sales fore because, instead of the sales copy, now your salespeople have to do against increasing resistance what your sales copy could have done more effectively against almost zero resistance. All you end up with is astronomic cost of sales.

  9. Creates inconsistencies in your sales process. It lends itself to speaking too much "server room" tech English and not enough "boardroom" business English. And inconsistencies undermine brands faster than Bill Clinton's falling trousers in the Oval Office.

  10. Emphasises the manual labour part of your work and suppresses the comprehensive, business-wide improvement good IT services can provide. You get paid for your manual labour but not for the truly valuable bits and bobs: Your thinking.

  11. Fails to create your desired action. You need buyers to take certain actions to move to the next stage of the buying cycle. If that doesn't happen, you end up wasting your time on buyers who never buy from you.

  12. Connects you with procurement agents. Instead of peer-to-peer relationships with buyers, you get hired through RFPs into master-slave relationship to do commodity tactical IT grunt work, like pulling cables, fixing pieces of code and replacing hard drives. At the same time, your well-positioned competitors are doing the high-level, high-paid strategic work.

  13. Can tank your brand that you've spent years to build. The equivalents of...
    • "Let's eat, grandpa" vs. "Let's eat?grandpa"

    • "Psychotherapist", but get "Psycho?the?rapist"

    • "Women get first-hand job experience vs. "Women get first hand job, experience"

    • The Vogons make excellent meals for visiting tourists vs. excellent meals of visiting tourists (Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy)

    • "You know Dr. Evil, I used to think you're crazy. Now I can see you're nuts" or "I can see your nuts" (Austin Powers in Goldmember)

Can cause serious setbacks in your sales process, and every little setback has to be compensated by more human effort at significant prices.

It's like buying a "low budget" dog and barking yourself.

Why?

Because it's a cheap dog and can't be trained to bark at the right time. So, technically, you have a dog but it only gives you more work of cleaning up the hair and poop.

Besides, your neighbours are laughing their arses off as they see you bark at the full moon, while your dog is peacefully sleeping in your bed.

But Good Copy...

Wrapping It All Up

In the 1970s, IBM had it all. Fame, fortune and money.

It had made a killing on the mainframe market.

Then it entered the personal computer arena... using the same IBM brand.

It got almost laughed out of the market.

What does a mainframe giant know about what people need in personal computers? Nothing. Not a sausage.

Yes, your brand is something that the market hangs around your neck.

But you can influence that. And that's what good copy does.

The reality is that if you don't have great copy, you don't have a real business that can sell premium services to great clients who seek high value and are ready and willing to pay for it.

Without great copy, you can't have sales and can't launch new services because you can't engage your target market.

And if you can't engage your prospects and persuade them to take your call to action, well you don't have a business.

Maybe a glorified hobby.

Yes, you can put together your sales army of phone pounders dialling for dollars and roaming the land and knocking on doors, but that's a rather sad state of affairs.

It's costly and very ineffective. Besides, buyers, especially during the first half of the sales process, do their level best to avoid salespeople like the plague.

Remember, every single piece of collateral - white paper, case study, web page, etc. - that you create can either open the door for you to begin a meaningful conversation with a new buyer with a problem that your firm can solve or slam the door in your face, rearranging the structure of your conk locking you out forever.

Copywriting is really the language of marketing. Yes, even in the age of content marketing. All marketing is driven by copy. The words and the message you send out - your copy - is the foundation of your client acquisition ability.

And it doesn't make a dickybird of a difference how many tonnes of content you produce, unless and until you have good sales copy, your content alone won't generate a penny of revenue.

With bad copy, there's a painfully low ceiling on your growth and profits.

But with good copy, the sky's the limit!

Good copy gently nudges, guides and escorts readers forward inside your sales funnel to the point of sales. Cheap copy either nudges them backwards or right out of your funnel never to return.

So, here is the big copy debate for you...

If all you need is an imbecilic dump of over-hackneyed rhetoric and vending-machine cliches based on an almost random heap of haphazardly patched together words and phrases sitting on your website as cyber vomit and literary excrement that no one reads and gives two shits about, yes, that can be as little as $50.

And if you hire someone from India, Bangladesh or Albania, it can be as little as $5.

But if you require valuable, engaging, action-oriented copy that your buyers can notice, read, remember, share and take action on, then you have to add some zeros... west of the decimal point.

But for a moment, think about how many people are exposed to your copy and how many of them become paying clients.

Now take the client lifetime value of the number of people who have convert to clients and the number of people who don't.

The gap indicates how much you lose out, how much cheap trash copy is costing your business.

In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.

Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.