
Before we start, let's get one thing clear. This post is not about the copies we make for you on our copy machines. It's about the copy (text) that appears on your website and in your promotional materials. No matter what type of business you run, copy affects every part of your business. It's the cornerstone of your marketing, and it affects the executive team, the HR department, and every aspect of the organization.
How?
We entrepreneurs want to do everything personally. This often includes menial tasks that can cost us money. Sure, we get the satisfaction of doing it ourselves, but that satisfaction comes at the cost of profit. Broken faucet? We're on the job! But the time spent fixing that plumbing is time we didn't spend on the business, and that lost time could have earned us far more than what we saved by doing the job ourselves.
In his classic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Robert Frost speaks of taking a moment to watch the snow collect on the trees along a dark lane, presumably on his way to somewhere important. He closes with these lines:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
As business professionals, we all struggle at times with similar feelings, conflicts, and doubts.
If your business is planning to rebrand itself (whether through a name change, a new logo, a business merger, or some other means), remember the name and/or logo is not the only thing that changes.
When it comes to content marketing, you can try all the advertising, promotional, and PR ploys, but authenticity remains key. What is authenticity, you might ask?
These days, the Internet has asserted its ubiquity on everything from social media and e-commerce to the way consumers communicate and get information. That said, printing and paper-based marketing are still strong -- and that's not about to change anytime soon. In this context, it's either you adapt your ad copy to a mix of printing and digital or see your business fall by the wayside.
We don't want that last part, do we?