The Hospitality Industry By the Numbers (October 2021)
Blah blah blah, COVID-19 pandemic, blah blah blah. I won’t insult your intelligence with some boilerplate paragraph about how the past 18 months have been tough on the hospitality industry. You know it. You’ve lived it. Instead, let’s listen to the numbers and see what they’re telling us. Fortunately, it’s not all bummer numbers (although there are a few…sorry). The hospitality industry continues to see big shifts as a result of the pandemic. Some of these effects won’t be felt right away, which is why we need to see the way the wind is blowing now. Get out ahead of these changes and put yourself in a better position as…
Passive and Active Voice: When to Use Each for Stronger Writing
“DON’T USE PASSIVE VOICE,” writers shout from atop their mountains of self-superiority. “YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO,” I shout back, with my fingers in my ears and my tongue sticking out in an extremely mature fashion. The thing is, snooty writers aren’t entirely wrong when they decry the use of the passive. Active is often a stronger, more concise way to write. But there are times where the passive is the right choice. So get a slice of pie and let’s go to grammar school. What Are Passive Voice and Active Voice? In active voice, the subject of the sentence is taking the action. In passive voice, the…
11 Tools That Can Make You a Better Writer
My father has been building things since before I was born. In his 20s, he was a furniture maker, first independently, and later for the famous Kittinger Furniture Company in Buffalo, NY (where my sisters and I were born.) His career has taken him from craftsman to plant manager to company president to owner of his own furniture company. But he is, at heart, a builder. And that means that every home he’s had since I was a kid included a workshop chock full of tools. Wood-handled chisels. Drills and nail guns. Jars full of screws, nuts, bolts, and other methods of joinery that I couldn’t identify. Gallons of wood…
Features & Benefits: The BFFs of Great Sales Copy
There was a time in my life where I spent 0% of my days researching skincare. Alas, I am not as young as I used to be. So now, I spend a significantly larger amount of my free time looking up serums and toners, moisturizers and creams, in an effort to stave off the irrevocable vestiges of time marching across my face. The other day, during one of my research seshes, I came across this product description: Are your eyes glazing over yet? Do you have any idea what this product is supposed to do for you other than the vague “target multiple signs of aging at once?” Because I sure don’t. …
Blog with Purpose (Because Otherwise, You’re Just Journaling)
Pouring yourself a cup of tea (or bourbon) and quietly writing your thoughts in a journal is a great way to clear your mind. I write a few longhand pages most mornings for this very purpose, sans bourbon of course. But if that’s how you approach your business blog, you’re probably not having the kind of success you’d like. Blogging is part of a larger marketing strategy, which means we have to be strategic about how we approach it. You can have fun with it! But it needs to have a clear purpose if it’s going to help you achieve your goals. Whether your blog is for an event venue, a…
Small Copy, Big Impact: Writing Your Call to Action
Ever go to a big event, like a music festival or a food fair? You wait in line and present your tickets, and then…you freeze. Faced with multiple stages, stalls, or activities, you’re unsure where to start. In this scenario, you’ve already paid your admission fee, so this temporary glacial moment is no big deal. But when it happens to people who visit your website—who haven’t decided whether to spend their money with you—this indecision can spell the end of the sale. Even if your business doesn’t technically operate online, chances are you have an online presence. Restaurants take online orders, hotels have web-based reservation software, wedding venues schedule site…
A/B Testing for Better Email Marketing
If you have an email list (and you’re actually using it), you’re probably aware that email marketing has a great ROI. Every time you send an email to your list, you’re either nurturing those leads or trying to make a sale. But if you’re paying attention to the numbers (which we’ll discuss more below), you probably find that some emails do their job better than others. An email you thought was going to be a big money-maker turned out to be a dud. Or one that you dashed off in the five minutes between a site visit and a health inspection brought in beaucoup bucks—and you have no idea why.…
Key Email Marketing Metrics—And What They’re Telling You
In a perfect world, email copywriters could follow a very simple writing formula. They’d type in the same magic words for every single client and get huge sales week after week. Clients would be thrilled. Copywriters would be thrilled. Everyone would be thrilled. In the real world, it doesn’t always work out that way. Each client is different, and so is their market. While there are tried-and-true copywriting tactics that improve your chances of getting great results, there can also be a lot of trial and error along the way as you figure out what your audience responds to. Assessing what works and what doesn’t can be as simple as…
What Is Voice of Customer Data and How Can It Improve Your Copy?
Anything with the word “data” in it sounds intimidating if you’re not a spreadsheet junkie, but it’s not that scary! In fact, we could remove the word “data” entirely from the term, and it would still mean the same basic thing. The voice of the customer (VOC) is basically how a customer would describe you, your products, and services. But it’s their voice, right? So instead of you and your marketing team sussing out what you think customers think, using VOC channels lets them tell you. Directly. In their own words. Why is that valuable in copy? Copywriting is how you convince a potential customer that your service or offering either solves their problem…
Things I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Pre-COVID
The one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic’s aggressive foothold in the United States is fast approaching. A year of cancelled plans, shuttered restaurant dining rooms, and missed celebrations with friends; of postponed weddings, remote schooling, and working from home. On this day in 2020, none of us knew what we were in store for, but we could tell that this was not like SARS or Ebola — illnesses covered at length in the media, but with little impact on our day-to-day lives. I first knew that this was serious when SXSW was cancelled just a week before it was due to begin. We had many more questions about the virus…
