Lauren Jefferson - FocusCopy®

Why Companies Need to Focus on Their Copy in 2020

Copywriting / By Lauren Jefferson / September 18, 2019 June 1, 2021

Business communication is now more important than ever. Scandals, success, missed opportunities, synergy… How you shape the story is critical to business success. It’s becoming more important for companies to focus on their communication pieces by the second – not minutes or hours.

Information Collection Taken To The Next Level

We are living in a world of information collectors and hoarders. It is estimated that data created next year will be greater than all material generated since people started recording information thousands of years ago. (Check out some cool big data facts here.)

Many people shy away from using libraries and dictionaries. Instead, they use Google or other search engines as their main source of information. Why? We created a world that craves instant gratification for everything we could possibly want to learn.

Greater than our external need for information, organizations use online storage tools, intranets, wikis, and other real-time internal search engines to locate information related to their employer, industry, and numerous other topics. It’s quicker than flipping through a dated binder of SOPs.

In 2020, companies must focus on their copy in all areas of their business – sales copy, content strategy, and internal communications. Your prospective customer can subconsciously spot good copy from bad and will immediately click to another page that is better. It’s critical to fight for the top spots on the results page.

Why Companies Need to Focus on Their Copy in 2020

In this world of overwhelming information, your customers want to get what they want, now. As a result, companies need to accelerate their copy production and improvement to meet demands.

So, what does this mean for business to business communication? And how should we create and publish copy in a prioritized manner?

Copy Needs To Be Fresh

First, your copy must be fresh, original, crisp, focused, and contain only essential information. More detailed voluminous materials should be included in a referenced document that the user can open by clicking “for more information”.

One tip that we give our clients is to strip out all the fluff or embellishment. Sure, those extra words may paint a picture more delicately, but are those extra words getting in the way of the big picture? Quite simply, more words take more time to read and the value from these extra words often provide little or no extra value to the reader.

Keep it fresh.

Copy Needs To Be Focused

Second, the copy must focus on what impact it will have on your prospect. What’s the Big Benefit? People, in general, have become very self-focused. If the copy they read doesn’t impact them directly or require their action, they start to question why they are reading it in the first place.

Click.

They’ve moved on. That is why it’s so important to evaluate if your company’s existing copy is focused.

Even worse… Your prospect may subconsciously record the sender’s identity (i.e. your company’s brand) and skip future communications from you.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at your email inbox. If you’re like most, you have many unread emails from people that are sending you content, sales pitches, promotions, and more. The thing is… Internet Service Providers (ISP) and email service providers (like Gmail) will start to learn your habits and stick the emails your to dreaded spam filter. That means more than just your prospects not opening emails… It will also hurt your deliverability for future prospects that actually want to receive your emails.

SEO Best Practices May Have Changed

Finally, Google reputedly makes over 500 adjustments to their SEO algorithm every year. That means within 2-3 years, SEO is completely different. That’s also one of the reasons why I fell in love with digital marketing… It will always be a new day with new challenges. How does that impact you? What your company did for SEO a year ago may not work as effectively in 2020. It’s important that as we enter Q4 of 2019, you need to reassess your weak points in SEO and to improve your SEO.

So how does your website copy rank in terms of search-ability and ease of finding information? Does the information about your new product, service, update, or landing pages rank as #1 of 230,000 hits or #250? Guess which site your potential customers will look at? It’s the #1 result… Maybe if you’re lucky, they will go down to result #5.

Here’s the kicker… A decade ago, users were okay with spending 15, maybe 30 seconds searching for relevant content. Now, they spend only 5-8 seconds searching! That means your information must rank in the top 5 hits when they search your keyword. Assuming they find your page, they want the core information in no more than 10 seconds!

Some areas to look at include:

How your content is categorized and organized
Your inbound and outbound links
Readability scores
Keywords (might want to check how many results your best keywords have; competition is tight)

Up Your Business Game By Focusing On Your Copy in 2020

So, how should a business ”up its game” and provide copy that its target audience wants to and needs to read? There are formulas for this, but these formulas only work if you know exactly what you want to write, who will read it, and what you want them to get out of it.

There are two things that you can do… Reassess how your existing copy is being used and apply our CFE Framework to future copywriting and content creation.

Reassess How You Use Your Copy

If the copy doesn’t support anything your prospect needs to do their job and support their buying decision – what VALUE is it to you? It’s wasting valuable real estate on your website, email campaigns, etc.

It’s important to understand and audit how your copy is working for you and against you. Junk? Delete it. It may be tempting to fill that blank space with other content, but if it’s not valuable, do not add it.

CFE Framework

Our CFE Framework shows you exactly how to get clarity and focus around your copy before you execute the creation and publication of the copy. If your business takes the time and effort to clarify exactly what they need and focus on its creation, publication, distribution, and search-ability, then your business will definitely benefit… Your prospects will read your copy more frequently and better understand your offer… Thus, increasing the likelihood that that prospect will convert into a buy.

Need help preparing for 2020? We are standing by. Click here to explore how to you can surpass your competition with copy improvements.

What Happens When Your Company Doesn’t Have SOPs

Systems / By Lauren Jefferson / September 4, 2019 October 31, 2023

Companies in all industries, big and small struggle with SOPs. Many people see Standard Operating Procedures as monotonous documents that do not add real value to the company. I only discovered the value of SOPs after something BIG happened in a company that didn’t have SOPs.

What Happened When My Company Didn’t Have SOPs

My first full-time job out of college was at a financial consulting and advisory firm. The owner and founder of the company was my professor and mentor. Although we were a small company (3-4 employees with multiple consultants), we were innovative. We created training and resource platforms for the CFO. We coached CFOs to be financial leaders. Our website moved mountains and connected customers from over 20 countries together. We had a lot of momentum, and we were just getting started. However, the majority of our business processes were not written down and were stored in our owner Jim’s brain.

Then the unthinkable happened… It was a Thursday morning. We had a meeting scheduled to take our coaching program to the next level.

My phone rang…

“Lauren, Jim passed away last night.”

After the shock of losing a friend, valued boss, and former professor subsided, I said these words… “His brain. All the information is gone.”

25 + years of experience, ideas, strategies, processes, and memories… Gone.

And unfortunately, we had not recorded or documented internal processes making it very difficult to operate without the expert.

While it is difficult to anticipate the loss of the brains behind a company, especially at the young age of 60, you need to be prepared by documenting day to day operations, and long term plans and goals.

What Happens When Your Company Doesn’t Have SOPs

When a business has and uses Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), it is usually a sign that they have defined business strategy and can articulate how they want their business to evolve and grow. It also indicates that the company is sophisticated or at least anticipating becoming more sophisticated. SOPs act like the keel and rudder of a boat which keep the boat or ship sailing in the desired direction.

Companies Become Coracles

Companies become coracles.

What are coracles? And what has it got to do with SOPs?

To answer this question, have you ever seen a boat without a keel or rudder (check out a cwrwgl or Welsh Coracle)? Coracles – an ancient watercraft – are round, flat-bottomed boats with no keel or rudder. They may be fun for playing on a river or catching salmon, but they never or rarely carry more than one person. They are also difficult to paddle in a straight line (some say impossible) – which is always the shortest path between two points.

Business operations without SOPs are modeled after a coracle. They may operate well so long as the person running the company (paddling the coracle) is always there. But if they become ill, die, or simply quit the company, then what happens?

No one else in the company can paddle the coracle.

Many will try. Most, if not all, will fail because it requires a special skill – one that isn’t written down. So the business, just like a coracle without a skilled paddler, will lose direction. Perhaps even go around in circles, until someone grabs a rudder and shouts “enough!”.

Ultimately, we need to define and document how we work, where we are going, and how we will get there.

Companies Don’t Fire The Sacred Cow

Another thing that happens when your company doesn’t have SOPs is that you might have a difficult time firing employees that do not meet certain standards. These employees manage to stick around because they…

Have been around forever (or at least it feels that way)
Possess knowledge about essential processes and are often reluctant to share it
Retain key information about clients and products

Can you picture that person? We like to call them the Sacred Cow. They run havoc in the company because they manifest all the processes and are unwilling to share.

As a result, these individuals often hold what they know over the company’s heads, which makes it difficult to fire that employee.

Silos Form Between Departments

Companies often use SOPs to facilitate cross-department training. Different departments understand how others work and what they need from them. It helps create transparency inside of the business therefore, breaking down the invisible walls in the company.

But when a company doesn’t have SOPs written and a part of the culture, silos form.

Why are silos in companies bad? Silos create division, make it easy to hide inefficiencies, and make it incredibly difficult to make any meaningful change in the company.

For example, I once worked with a company who had multiple offices that needed to be on the same page with their processes and systems. Without SOPS, there was inefficiency in how they conducted business and allowed for operational vulnerabilities that might have major effects.

Operations Stop When Key Employees Are Out

Sick days, vacation days, and life events happen. It’s a natural part of company operation. Without SOPs, operations stop when those key employees are out.

A couple sick days may not hurt your operation. However, 6 months of medical leave, maternity/paternity leave, or winning the lottery and disappearing to an island will have serious consequences on your operation.

Company Disasters Can and Do Happen

When your company doesn’t have SOPs, it creates an opportunity for disaster to occur – some of which are irrecoverable. Although unpleasant to think about, think about companies that were in the path of a natural disaster… Whatever the disaster, if those affected companies didn’t have SOPs to respond to the disaster, then it would be highly unlikely that they would last more than 6 months to a year… If that. Even if in these disasters, no one was hurt (or even died), the likelihood of survival after disasters without SOPS is unlikely.

Company “Innovation” Isn’t Innovating Anything

When you don’t have anything written down, any innovation you try to enact doesn’t really innovate anything. Instead, it’s often reinventing the wheel (and makes more work for yourself). It’s difficult to see what needs improvement. An innovation that isn’t documented rarely gets into production and even more rarely becomes your most successful…

If you innovate something but can’t reproduce it because you didn’t document what you did and how, is that an innovation or a disaster? Only you can decide. That innovation could have been your first, or next million dollar product. But if you can’t recreate it, then it has a business value of exactly $0. Think about it… You may not like to create documentation. You may not even be good at it. But if you don’t do it and don’t create SOPs, then it could be a very costly mistake. To help, we’ve created the Easy-To-Implement Scalable SOP Framework that you can access for free.

When your company doesn’t have SOPs, it creates an opportunity for disaster to occur.

Implement Our Scalable SOP Framework & Scale Your Business Processes With Ease

become more process-oriented, productive, & focus on what moves the needle the furthest with this framework

Difference Between Copywriting and Content Marketing

Copywriting, Marketing / By Lauren Jefferson / August 8, 2019 June 1, 2021

English is an incredibly powerful and often complex language. It’s estimated that the average number of English words a person knows is 10,000-20,000. To put that into perspective, there’s over 470,000 English words. That means most English speakers only use and/or know only 5% of the English language.

Then beyond just the numbers, there are different dialects of English. While I grew up in Texas, I also grew up as a European. You see, my parents are British and raised us up with the British dialect. You can imagine mixing the Queen’s English, American English, and a Texan twang. One thing that I learned growing up is that words – when strung together strategically – can be incredibly effective at convincing someone to do something.

Whether it’s convincing someone to click the button to buy or creating an emotional connection…

WORDS HAVE POWER.

One thing that many people mistakenly use interchangeably is copy and content. So… I’d like to share the difference between copywriting and content marketing AND why your company needs to have two separate strategies.

Difference Between Copywriting and Content Marketing

The main difference between copywriting and content marketing is the answer to this question…

“Is my purpose to sell?”

If the answer is “yes”, then it’s copywriting.

If the answer is “no”, then its content marketing.

Ideally, all content marketing would also be copywriting.

Not all copywriting is content marketing though.

Definition of Copywriting

The definition of copywriting is… “the act of writing material (copy) to persuade the intended audience to take a requested action”. In other words, copywriting is persuasive writing. Typically, its goal is to sell something or to take a specific transactional step; however, it could also be to convince (i.e. pitch and sell to) your employees to buy-in to your vision and brand.

Copywriting is unique in that is does not always have to be presented in a written text. It could be behind a video sales letter, a webinar, commercial, or an image.

In addition, copywriting focuses solely on how the product / service / idea is going to benefit them.

Each piece of copy includes a hook or attention grabber. This is something that makes the reader move from the first line to the second line. Then comes the pain the customer is experiencing… This is key because without a pain point, the product isn’t really solving anything. Then the copy moves into the solution – your product or service – and how it benefits the reader. Most copy also includes a guarantee, a sense of urgency (i.e. registration is closing soon), and scarcity (i.e. there’s only 100 seats open).

Definition of Content Marketing

Conversely, content marketing is the publication and promotion of content (blogs, videos, social media, etc.) that attract a target audience but does not explicitly ask for the target audience to take a specified action. Moreover, content marketing creates brand awareness, allows the site to be search-able, and moves the company from just another option to an authority.

Most content teaches, enlightens, or brings awareness to a specific topic. It usually includes an intro (like the hook), the content, and then a conclusion. Good content will also have copy inside of it – call to actions.

When I first started in my marketing journey, I loved content marketing – still do. There are so many ways you can splinter off topics into mini lessons, stories, and ideas. It came very naturally to me. However, effective content needs to have a strategy that includes copywriting.

Content Marketing Strategy

Because there is so much content out on the Internet, it’s critical that you put together a content marketing strategy that differentiates you from the crowd.

For example, there is a consulting firm that offers accounting services. An obvious topic to discuss on a blog is cash flow. BUT there is no way that you can effectively talk about cash flow in 1,000 words. They splinter the topic a little further into cash flow reporting. BUT they could talk about daily cash reports, 13-week cash flow reports, cash flow forecasts, etc.

Steps To Build Your Copywriting Strategy

Building your copywriting strategy starts with…

1. Initial Prep-Work

Before you start writing, you need to start with the prep-work.

What are you trying to accomplish? Lead generation, acquire contact information, sell a $100 product, set up a meeting for a $20,000 contract, etc…. Whatever it is, write down the intended goal for your copy.

Then identify the intended customer. Most likely, you have already done this. BUT this time go into depth about your customer. Give them a name. What are they experiencing? What is their life like? How do they feel? What are their concerns, Why do they want to talk to you?

Finally, answer these questions…

What are the benefits of the product/service and how will the customer benefit from taking the requested action?

What are the benefits of the benefits?

And the benefits of those benefits?

Another question we ask during our prep-work session is…

So what?

Ask that several times to get the real benefits to your customer’s customer (i.e. the people they are trying to sell to).

2. Figure Out How You Are Going to Distribute the Copy

Then you need to figure out how you are going to distribute the copy. You can do it through…

Videos
Sales letters
Long-form social media
Voice or audio (think radio or podcast)

All are totally valid and effective forms of copy distribution.

3. Start Writing For The Intended Distribution Method

You get all your information and how you are going to distribute it. Now, it’s time to start writing.

Start with identifying your tone – rebellious, sarcastic, professional, vulnerable, dry… Carry that tone throughout the entire copy.

Depending on your intended distribution method, you may format your copy a little differently. But the general format is…

Hook / Headline
Problem
Solution
Benefits
Benefits
Price
Benefits
Buy Now
Benefits

Have I said benefits enough? That’s the real difference between contenting marketing and copywriting.

4. Proofread

Before you publish, proofread, and then proofread again – use different people and get them to read it out loud. Strangely, reading copy from the last word to the first word also catches a lot of errors too!

You do not want to have your sales letters riddled with typos or nonsensical language.

5. Test and Retest

Just when you think that you’re done, it’s time to test your copywriting strategy and retest. It’s important for you to track how effective (or ineffective) your copy is. First, you need to drive enough traffic to the piece of copy to be able to test it. Get a baseline conversion rate – conversions / traffic = conversion rate %. Then test different variables like distribution methods, button color, headline copy, etc. Be sure to only test one variable at a given time. Think back to your 6th grade science experiments!

If the conversion rate increases, keep the change and test something else.

If the conversion rate decreases, go back to the original copy and test something else.

Next Steps…

So, what are your next steps? Evaluate your current copywriting and content marketing strategies. Does your company have a strategy? Is it as effective as you want? If not, contact us. We can help you improve your sales and sales potential by working on your strategy. Reach out to us today to schedule your free consultation.