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…
How Well Do You Know Your Target Market?
Let’s start with a little hypothetical here. You own a wedding venue, and you’re using your blog to attract organic traffic to your website. Good for you! That’s what I would do in your situation, too. So you’re doing a little brainstorming, trying to figure out what potential brides and grooms would be interested in that could get them to your site. You settle on a blog about how couples can save money wedding planning. You write it up, make sure it’s got some good SEO juice for the keyword “how to save money on wedding,” and wait for the visitors. Over the next couple of weeks, your blog post…
Restaurant WordPress Plugins Made Simple
When I started my company website about two years ago, my only significant website experience was with Squarespace. So when I tried to dive into WordPress, there was quite the learning curve. I spent a ton of time scouring the internet, trying to figure out how to make my site behave. I’m still not a site building expert by any stretch. But I have picked up some knowledge over the past couple years from running my own WordPress site and blog. Since most restaurant and venue operators are also not site development experts, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about restaurant plugins and how you can use them to add extra functions to your…
