A simple pitch won’t do it; the trick is to get personal.

Your emails or calls need to speak to that particular company. Instead of contacting them for a pitch, contact them to start a conversation. Subsequently, a relationship will be started.

While a relationship will take longer to get going, there’s a big benefit: more long-term sales. There are other benefits, too:

1. You don’t get shot down right away. If you are just gunning for a client, the prospect won’t even bother listening to you. All you are trying to do is make money, not help them.
2. You serve the client more effectively. Do you know what happens when you stop pitching? You start listening. By hearing what the client wants and needs, you can adapt your services to meet their needs. In that way, you become indispensable. If you’re just trying to get a client, you’ll be too busy pitching to hear what the client has to say.
3. You stay in front of the client (which = repeat business!). By keeping a relationship with the prospect, you will be at the forefront of his/her mind when the next project comes along and you are needed again. You don’t have to pitch – you will just get the project. That means more time to develop more relationships.

In short, building relationships is an upfront investment of your time that results in a steadier stream of sales. When working on your copy, get personal – research your prospect first and make sure to ask questions and include content that speaks directly to them. You’ll thank me in the long run.

There’s no point in spending the money and energy marketing to a lousy list. If you have a list full of unqualified leads that won’t be interested in what you have to offer, what’s the point?

Here are a few things that your list needs to be successful:

1. Your list needs to be targeted.

Don’t try to please everybody. Pick an industry or a location. Many successful B2B marketers ask, "Would you rather have 10% of 100 or 1% of 1,000?" Shrink your list down to a couple hundred and massage it regularly until the leads start falling out. You’ll have a much higher success rate than if you just send a blanket sales letter to 5,000 businesses.

2. Your list needs names.

You are not marketing to a company – you are marketing to a person. Get a name to send that packet or letter to. You can use LinkedIn, Jigsaw, or even a good ol’ fashioned Google search. This will also help you focus your copy – it’s easier to write to a person than write to a company. It increases the chances your stuff will get read.

3. Your list needs to have people that will want your services.

Does this seem too obvious? You’re not just looking to sell your widgets to any business that will buy from you – even if you’re desperate. Figure out what kind of business needs your services the most and target them. That, again, narrows your focus, which leads to sales.

4. Put it together yourself.

With the sheer amount of information you can find on the internet, you don’t need to be spending your hard-earned money renting a poor-quality list. Use a service like Jigsaw to put together a targeted list of companies in a few minutes. If you don’t want to pay for Jigsaw, use it to just get the company names and addresses, and then use LinkedIn and Google to figure out who you need to market to within the company. If you work through the list yourself, you have a better chance of having good quality leads rather than trusting a third-party service.

You could have the nicest car in the world, but if your map sends you the wrong way, it doesn’t matter where you’re driving – you won’t get where you need to be. Likewise, you can have the best marketing materials in town, but if you are targeting a worthless list, you’re wasting your time (and money!).

One of the cardinal rules of marketing is that you do not make too many assumptions about your target market. In other words, you need to educate them and show them why you need your services. This is easy to remember when marketing to consumers; many companies (sometimes unfairly) look at their market as people who need to be brought up to speed. But fellow business professionals? They already get it, right?

Wrong. One of the biggest lessons that I see in every book or article about corporate executives is that they are real people, just like everyone else. As such, they may need to be educated on your services and why they are needed.

For example, say you run a company that develops computer security software for high-end corporate networks. Anybody who thinks about it can certainly agree that computer security is a big deal in today’s world. But is that knowledge enough to make the sale? Probably not. If you send them a sales letter detailing your encryption process or your SSH client, they’ll probably throw it away.

But, if you send them a sales letter showing the vulnerabilities that may be in their system, or tell them a story of what can happen if their network is not secure, then you have a much better chance of making that sale!

Just like marketing to consumers, marketing to businesses involves you getting into the mind of your target. Think about it from their point of view – what will make them jump through hoops to sign a contract with you?

Example: what if I sent you a letter that says the following:

My name is Tom Meitner and I am a freelance copywriter who writes the following things: sales letters, brochures, Web copy, etc. I also know some designers.

Are you itching to pick up the phone? No. Now, imagine you received a letter that said this:

As a freelance copywriter, I save you money and time by getting your copy done with a fast turnaround time at a fraction of the price of a full marketing agency. My work recently doubles the response rate of the follow-up copy that a Hawaiian entertainment business was using, and I even have a strong network of designers that ensure a “turnkey” process for your next project – turn it over to us and we will bring you back fast results with high quality!

That’s certainly not the be-all, end-all to copy. As a matter of fact, I just came up with it on the spot here. I’d probably review it a few times. But, the second one is persuasive copy, and that’s what you want to shoot for. Informative copy is about you, and persuasive copy is about the client. Informative copy tells them what you do, persuasive copy tells them what they get. No prospect wants to read about you. Ever. They want to know why it matters to them.

So persuade them.

In the episode I watched last night, he wound up fainting while everybody was resting in a cabin. He fell on top of one of the female members of the group and everybody had to pick him up. He had no idea what happened. His body was trying to tell him that he needed to eat more.

When business is slow, there are a lot of easy scapegoats. Right now, that scapegoat is the economy. Everyone wants to use the economy as the reason why their business is down. But marketing your business is like feeding your body: you can go a little while without doing it, but eventually it’s going to catch up with you. Your business will start to break down. The companies that succeed are the ones that start cutting costs elsewhere and pushing all that money into marketing.

Let me simplify this for you: when business is down, what do you need most? More sales. How do you get more sales? Marketing. The end.

Why is the marketing budget the first thing to cut? It should be your number one priority. This isn’t a sales pitch to get you to hire me and my team for your next project (although if you’re interested, contact me!). This is a plea to the business owners of the world to stop blaming everything around them when they aren’t marketing nearly as much as they could, or should, be. Feeding your body is one of the top priorities in your daily life. So should feeding your business.

Anyway, I’ve found myself popping in these old tapes and laughing myself silly, just as I had as a younger boy. But amidst all of the laughter, my mind turned to writing, as it often does, and I thought of some interesting takeaways that illustrate some very important points about copywriting and marketing your business:

Use your flaws to your advantage.

Ryan Stiles is tall and fairly goofy-looking. Drew Carey is overweight. Colin Mochrie is bald. There’s no hiding these facts. So, instead of pretending they don’t exist, the guys on the show turn them into jokes – often hilarious ones – and nobody gets offended. Why? Because everybody knows about them already. You might as well use them for laughs.

Think about your business. Is there any flaw that’s really obvious to your audience? Instead of hiding it or avoiding it, address it directly in your copy. Heck, you could even have a section in your brochure entitled, “Isn’t this service a ripoff?”, and then you can answer that openly. It puts you in the driver’s seat of your reputation.

Don’t assume anything about what your audience knows.

Every episode of Whose Line opens up with Drew Carey explaining that “Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter”, and then goes on to detail that he picks a fake winner and they get to do a skit with him at the end of the show. If you’ve ever seen one episode of Whose Line, you know this already. Besides that, it’s one of those shows that you immediately understand once they start playing their first game anyway. But, they still explain it every week, just in case somebody doesn’t quite get it.

You may think it’s stupid to detail how your business works, or how it benefits someone. But if you just present the facts and assume that everyone wants what you’re trying to sell, you’re going to lose a lot of business potential. Take a few minutes to add a few lines showing how your business helps your customer, and I guarantee you’ll get a better ROI on that piece of marketing. Lead the customer through your product or service, and then show them exactly how to get a hold of you and buy.

Involve your audience.

Besides getting suggestions of topics for the games to be based on, the Whose Line cast also brings audience members up on to stage to sing to them, have them make sound effects, or even partake in a skit directly. It grips the audience and makes them all feel like a part of the show. That investment keeps their interest.

How do you get your audience to invest in your product? Your copy needs to do more than present your business. Make them think. Ask them an open-ended question that will help them to connect your business with their life, like “How secure do you feel in your financial future?” or “How much did you save on your last vacation?” Don’t just drop a “yes or no” question – give them something to think about. Then they can put 2+2 together.

Try to write for one person.

Some of the funniest moments on the show are when Colin and Ryan try to make each other laugh, or when Wayne busts up during a sketch. Hearing Drew laugh hysterically can bring instant laughter to anybody watching the show.

Focus your writing efforts. Don’t write for an audience. Envision your perfect prospect – the one type of reader that you would kill for. Now write to that person and that person only. You would be shocked at how much more focused you are. This is a one-on-one conversation, not a speech.

Don’t get too focused on flashiness.

The Whose Line set and regular props consists of four chairs, a desk, and a couple stools. They don’t need any more than that. There’s no dramatic music or fancy technology. It’s personal and inviting.

Ditch that flash intro on your web page. Everybody’s clicking “Skip Intro” anyway (I know I am!). Pick a designer that is more focused on highlighting your business than how fancy they can design something. Apple’s marketing has been simple and to the point, and it’s absolutely killed in the marketplace. Instead of going fancy, make your content stand on its own. Then allow the design to accentuate that.

It doesn’t take a lot to put together a good piece of copy – it just takes the right focus. Zero in on these points, and you’ll have a leg up on most of your competition.

What do you get when business goes down? Less money.

What do you need when you have less money? More money.

How do you get more money? You bring in more clients/customers.

And how do you do that? You market your business more.

So what do you cut first when you have less money? Marketing.

This makes absolutely no sense.

I’m as sympathetic as anybody about the troubles the current economy is causing small and medium-sized businesses. People are out spending less money, so businesses aren’t bringing in any more – at least as a whole. It only makes sense that this be the time you are inspired to build your budget around your marketing expenses. Marketing, at its heart, is telling people you exist to make their lives better. Repeatedly and in different formats, too. When you sit down to figure out your budget, pick a healthy number to attach to your marketing expenses, at least for a little while. Bringing in more business will fix the rest of the budget pretty quickly – but you can’t bring in more business without marketing.

Remember that when you are planning out your day, too. If you do a lot of marketing in-house, a significant amount of your time should be spent – every day – building new relationships with your market. You need to monitor the effectiveness and return on investment you are getting for your marketing materials and take a solid look at whether or not they are helping or hurting your business.

Being a freelance copywriter, I am certainly biased to the idea that you should spend more money on marketing. After all, I want you people to hire me! But, I’m also very realistic on the idea that marketing budgets are getting slashed. Even if you don’t hire me, you need to be spending a great deal of time and money on your marketing and advertising – find new ways to deliver your message and get people coming through those doors. If you don’t, then your doors might be locked up soon.

You can drop it in the mail or hand it off to a potential customer/client. You can keep a stack in your office and you can put them anywhere you want exposure.

Yes, the tri-fold brochure is a pretty powerful little piece of marketing for your business. It holds a lot more information than a business card, but it also needs to be easy to read quickly. It holds a lot of weight in any marketing campaign, yet so many people do it wrong. I’ve been to a lot of networking breakfasts and meetings over the years, and it stuns me just how many people slap together any ol’ brochure in the name of “saving money”.

I don’t think a lot of business owners really grasp how important the brochure is to your business. It, like any other piece of marketing, is a representation of how you do business. If you have a professional-looking brochure, people will know you do professional work. If your brochure looks like crap, your prospect will assume you do crappy work. So here are a few ways you can ensure that your brochure will knock their socks off and give you a chance for a sale.

For Pete’s sake, ditch Microsoft Publisher templates already!

I am a writer, not a designer. But if you gave me a stack of different brochures, I would be able to pick out the ones that were made with a Microsoft Publisher template without even trying. They are bland, generic, and they’re used everywhere. Heck, I even saw a design on a VAN the other day that clearly used a Publisher template! Using one of these templates just tells me you didn’t care to put any time or energy into it, even if that’s not true.

Watch the flow.

A good brochure is going to lead the reader throughout and each panel will build upon the last one. Here’s the general flow-plan you should follow:

• Establish the problem.
• Offer your product/service as the solution.
• Explain what makes your product/service the best or most unique solution.
• Prove it with facts and testimonials.
• Tell me to contact you and give the right contact information.

No typos.

I can’t even believe I have to write this. A glaring typo in your brochure tells me A) you’re stupid or B) you didn’t care enough to read this thing over. Read it twice, forwards and backwards. You’ll thank me later.

Don’t just use printer paper.

Are you getting the point that you shouldn’t cut corners with this thing? Get some nice card stock or at least a higher-quality paper. If you can print it glossy, even better. But it better not look like you printed it in your basement.

Use a few high-quality images.

If it’s all text, nobody will want to read it. Make it sizzle – include pictures of people if appropriate. Throw in a chart or something. And make sure that there won’t be even a hint of blurriness to any of it. A good brochure has crisp, clean images.

If you are not a writer/designer, outsource it now.

If you think you are a good writer or designer, you probably aren’t. If you were, you’d be doing that for a living. This isn’t a sales pitch – if you don’t want to hire me and my team to do it, fine. But hire somebody. It’s not expensive. If a professionally-designed and written brochure nabs a few more clients, how much is that worth to you? Look at it as an investment. Or you can save a little cash by having a couple of college students (upperclassmen, though, with good grades and references) do it. Having a professional do it is often the better deal.

If you insist on doing it yourself, please follow the rest of these rules. It will transform your sorry-looking little brochure into one that’s going to grab some eyes and make some sales.

Well, let me ask you this: are you reading any copy?

Yes, just like they taught you in grade school, to be a better writer, you need to read. In our case, we need to be reading copy: what’s working, what’s not working, what our competition is doing, etc. You need to subscribe to blogs like Copyblogger and, well, this one. It doesn’t matter if you think you are a great writer. You need to continually educate yourself and figure out new ways to communicate yourself effectively to your audience.

Nobody cares about what you have to say. You need to make them care. Reading copy tips and examples will help you better articulate what your business has to offer. You know what that means?

More sales.