Search engine marketing and copywriting make uneasy allies. SEM means writing for a machine, for an equation, for a filter. Copywriting means expressing human desire, passion, creativity for people. Yet when you can combine the basics of search engine marketing with creative copywriting, your clients win. Big time. And I’ll address this at the end.

But first, to illustrate this, I did a little experiment this last weekend with the beer making blog that’s updated by a few folks here at Pop Art. We planned this past Friday to drink our way around the world at the Portland International Beerfest, then do a beer review. I wanted to see firsthand how a linking strategy and keyword density strategy would work. Short answer: It worked really, really well.

Granted, it’s not like there’s a ton of competition over the Portland International Beerfest search term. But we drinkers and brewers tend to write a lot, and being the sort who are willing to pay $9 per six pack, we’re probably well-educated with a good income. Plus this is Portland, home of craft brew. My point is that this ain’t like competing over a zillion dollar search term like mesothelioma, but it’s a decent test.

Here’s how it went: (more…)

And now, an IM conversation between Dave and myself.

Dave Selden: 10:11
very interesting article here:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

Dave Selden: 10:11
I really like the “mind doesn’t know what the tongue wants” part
the fact that you can’t design a universal ketchup and please people
you have to design several ketchups that sub-groups can rally around

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
reading:
“Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”

Dave Selden: 10:14
seriously
sarah and I don’t eat ketchup
I guess we would buy ketchup if it tasted better
not something I really ever thought about

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
ketchup in australia is awesome.
no sugar.
just tomato and vinegar

Dave Selden: 10:15
wow

Thom Schoenborn: 10:15
with their bacon, which we call canadian bacon?
kick-ass.

Dave Selden: 10:15
ha
maybe I will make that next
british bacon is also awesome

Thom Schoenborn: 10:16
for sure:
“You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup.”

Dave Selden: 10:17
“If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.”

Thom Schoenborn: 10:18
Interesting.
I like the concept of the multiple versions of perfection:
“Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. [snip]  When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket.”

Dave Selden: 10:20
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
You can’t please all the people all the time, basically.

Dave Selden: 10:21
yeah

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
“If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”

Dave Selden: 10:21
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
in college, my magazine prof was the founder and editor of Guitar magazine.
about 10% of their subscriber base were bass players
they had, like, two sections of each issue dedicated to bass players.
and when they cut one of those sections, ONE SINGLE PAGE of editorial, they lost something like 8% of their subscriber base.

Dave Selden: 10:23
funny
that’s a lot

Thom Schoenborn: 10:23
in many ways, it’s about knowing not just what people like about your product — because people tend to like a lot of things about what you offer —
it’s about knowing about how passionate they are about those things.
which is a little different than this subject.
but they’re related.
We should just copy and paste this IM convo into a 72dpiiintheshade post.

Dave Selden: 10:24
do it.

Hee. “Blook.”

The top 10 most annoying web words:

1. Folksonomy
2. Blogosphere
3. Blog
4. Netiquette
5. Blook
6. Webinar
7. Vlog
8. Social network
9. Cookie
10. Wiki, podcast and avatar

via MarketingCharts.com

I attended some event in which a group of Wieden+Kennedy dudes talked about a survey they’d done to prove the value of their creative. So they asked a bunch of media buyers and marketing folks what they thought NIKE’s annual media spend was. The average guess was ridiculously higher than it actually was. To translate: advertising experts believed NIKE was spending about twice as much as they actually were because the ads were so memorable and fantastic.

The point is that creative executions which are daring and evocative can work twice as hard as mediocre executions for the same price. Throw that little anecdote into your next pitch. Tell ‘em you read it on the Internet…

Anyway, it’s also a great excuse to link you to this non-NIKE commercial, which is %&#@$%&ing hilarious. (Thanks, Ben.)

Older. But funny.

Via Geist

Our Director of Making Money and Being Smart, Chris Tacy, sent around a link to this summary of a BBDO research study about daily rituals and the emotions they reflect.

You really ought to read it, then come back here. It’s frickin’ awesome.

For one, it’s a reminder that when consumers choose things, they tend to choose first on emotional reasons, then later rationalize those choices with product features and benefits. So as marketers, we have to (more…)

One thing about my job that occasionally makes me grind my teeth is letting other folks write. Which is unfortunate, because my job title is “Copy Editor” and not “Lone Wolf.” I probably shouldn’t admit to feeling this way, but what are blogs if not text-based confessionals?

I expect that I am not alone among editors. All our co-workers speak and write the language, so we often feel compelled to justify our jobs by rewriting. Add to that fact I’ve mostly been a doer in my career up until this point: a writer instead of an editor.

And so it was with much glee that we recently had an internal project written by someone else, with only advice from me. It was not painless — I wasted half a day floundering with a pale rewrite. The original draft from our CEO had the message, but not the style. My draft had the style, but completely missed the point. (more…)

I call Pay Per Click (PPC) writing “Haiku for Dollars.” Mostly becuase I think it’s funny, and people laugh so I assume they agree. But PPC isn’t much of a creative strain — unlike most creative endeavors in which a broad base of life experience helps you connect concepts in bizarre ways, PPC tends to be as surprising a corn-fed blonde making the finals of American Idol. Or so I thought. And then realized, as usual, I was right the first time.

I’ll explain in a very long-winded fashion.

So with PPC, you have certain words (keywords, or search terms) that you gotta squeeze into tiny little character counts (25 character headlines, and two lines of 35 characters). And you’ve got to put the selling point in there, and do it in a way that it differentiates you from all the other crap PPC ads offered by the loyal opposition and noble competitors.

But you knew that. You probably also know about negative keywords. No? Well, it’s simple. Say you’re writing about a hybrid air-conditioner. You don’t want a guy searching for a new Toyota Prius to click on your ad, so you tell Google to NOT display your ad when someone searches for “hybrid car with air conditioner.” Because you don’t want to pay for that dirty, unqualified hippy to click your ad.

Clear?

So I’m writing a bunch of PPC ads about laminated veneer lumber a while back. (Laminated veneer lumber? Think of plywood stacked a foot thick then cut like a beam. Sorta. Anyway, it’s strong “engineered wood” used in home construction.) And in our list of negative keywords, I see WoW and “World of Warcraft.”

“What the hell?”

Well, laminated veneer lumber is known in the construction industry as LVL. And apparently, in the World of Warcraft, lvl is shorthand for “level.” So we don’t want some 42-year-old ubergeek searching for “lvl 60 druid” to get our ad. Because after all, everyone knows that searcher lives in his mom’s basement, only uses a hammer when his +9 crossbow of wounding has run out of magic arrows, and would be a throw-away click. There’s twenty-five cents the client will never see again.

Anyhoo. The point? Well, I assumed that someone on our team KNEW this shockingly geeky information about World of Warcraft and snuck it into our project. “Who put this Warcraft crap in my spreadsheet?” I bellowed like a lvl 30 orc. Because that kind of geekery cannot go un-teased.

But it turns out, Google somehow provides that list of negative keywords.

That’s it. That was entirely the point.

…

In other PPC-related news, I have an amusing tic that surfaces while writing PPC: flinching. Character counts matter, right? I can’t count characters as I write, but I have a sense for when a line’s getting too long. And as I get near the end of that suspicious line, I make a pained face and cringe like the word count button is going to bite me if I go over. It’s like gambling. “C’mon, baby! Be 35! 35! Let’s go! AWWWWWW, craps. Thirty seven. Shoot.”

And you thought copywriting was boring…

Here’s a checklist you may find useful when judging writing. It’s not really in any particular order, except maybe the first two or three items. And there’s probably a million exceptions to each of these, which I’m sure you’ll helpfully point out in the comments section.The real benefit of using this checklist: you’ll polish not just the words, but also “the big idea.”

1. Will the audience get it?

Use words and phrases you’ve heard the customer say. Avoid, when possible, the industry jargon of the company selling it. Unless industry wonks are the audience…

2. What are you selling them? Really?

Are you selling a widget? Or are you selling the idea that a widget provides some benefit, such as saving time, making money, protecting their future, recapturing vigor, etc? And ask yourself this: what’s the benefit of the benefit?

3. Does it work in context?

A billboard may not be the best place for a paragraph. A trade pub may not be the best place for a consumer ad.

4. Will it grab their attention?

Have you phrased the headline in such a way that it can’t be ignored? In a GOOD way?

5. Does it flow with the brand?

Does over-the-top work? Is subtle totally wrong?

6. Is it simple?

You should be able to reduce most ideas to just a few non-jargon words.

7. Is it too simple?

I said “non-jargon” words. Figure out a better way to say “solution.”

8. Have you tested it?

Ask a few qualified people (unattached to the project) to tell you the what and the why.

9. Can you sell the idea?

Will the client see the brilliance?

p.s. The one caveat to this list? You must actually read the copy you’re judging. Writing is not design — you can’t judge anything but the headline with a two-second glance.

p.p.s. What questions do you have about copywriting? Post them in the comments section, and I’ll either answer them or use them in a future post.